“Well, first of all, I want to be absolutely clear that I didn’t leave the hospital in order to work for Ron.” Her mouth pursed slightly, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I’d planned a month-long vacation in Spain and Portugal, and my mom convinced me to visit him at the beginning of my trip. I was going to head over to Barcelona that Tuesday, only …”
Only then, Alex’s bar fight had happened, and she’d been recruited as his minder.
The thought boggled him.
One day. One more day, and she’d have left. One more day, and he’d never have met her.
His shirt was damp, and the night was getting colder, and he shivered.
Her brow pinched as she studied him, and he preempted what she was about to say. “Don’t try to get out of this by claiming I’m too cold to keep talking. Pay your debt, Nanny Clegg. Why did you leave the hospital?”
She stretched out those short, cute legs, braced her hands by her hips on the granite bench, and looked up to the sky again.
“I made it thirteen years,” she said, her voice so low he could barely hear her. “Longer than any of the other emergency services clinicians who started around the same time as me. I was considered the old lady of my department before I left.”
While still in her late thirties? Jesus.
“The schedule was hard. Some weeks, I worked seventy hours, and I was on call a lot. The pay was good, though, especially with all the overtime, and I liked the camaraderie.” She lifted a shoulder. “I usually took the overnight shift and worked holidays, because I didn’t have a partner or kids to come home to. It was the only fair thing to do.”
He couldn’t help it. He groaned out loud, because holy fucking Christ, she was the fucking worst.
“What?” The heat of her glare was impressive, really, especially for such a self-sacrificing idiot.
He sighed dramatically. “Nothing. Go on.”
After one more irritated glance, she did. “Anyway, it was tiring. But that wasn’t why I left. Not really.”
The instincts that had made her shove him aside on the red carpet had been honed in the ER, she’d said. People would get agitated, she’d said.
He drew the natural conclusion. “It was the violence?”
In what seemed to be an unconscious gesture, she touched the crooked bridge of her nose, and now he knew. Some asshole in the ER had broken it.
Motherfucker. He needed to climb a thousand more steps. A million, to work off all this rage.
To his surprise, she shook her head. “It wasn’t the violence.”
He narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously, and she huffed out a little laugh.
“I mean, yes, people could get violent sometimes. Mostly they’d just insult you, but sometimes they’d throw stuff. Once in a while, they’d throw punches too, but security could handle that.”
She sounded so damn calm about it all. Unruffled, as if that kind of abuse didn’t take a toll eventually. As if her safety didn’t matter.
“Patients would get angry because I didn’t prescribe them meds.” She raised an authoritative forefinger. “Which I couldn’t do, just to be clear. Or because I was ordering involuntary inpatient hospitalization. Or because they were drunk and impatient, and I couldn’t evaluate them until after they sobered up, and they couldn’t go home before an evaluation.”
When he stretched out his own legs, they brushed against hers, and he let them. In that moment, he needed the contact. “But that wasn’t enough to make you quit.”
“No.” She drew in a slow breath, and blew it out through her nose.
Her eyes were brighter now than the stars above could explain. She blinked hard once, twice, and he wanted to interrupt, to make her laugh, to offer his shirt as a tissue.
He didn’t. He waited and kept listening. Which, for someone like him, was harder than any other reaction would have been.
Her mouth worked, and then she kept speaking. “My job involved seeing people at their very lowest. A lot of times, the problems were beyond anything I could possibly fix. People were suicidal because they’d lost their jobs or their housing. Kids wanted to die because they were being bullied. And after the hundredth time I had to add someone to a wait list for transitional housing or shelters, the hundredth time I put a mom and baby back out on the streets because I had no other alternative, the hundredth time I sent a kid back to the same situation that caused them to self-harm in the first place …”
No wonder she was crying. Absurdly, he was swallowing back tears too.