phone off the nightstand, sleepy-eyed nurse Beth Taylor squinted at the lit screen.
Who’d be texting her at …? She registered the time at just before midnight and winced. She’d just pulled two twelve-hour ICU shifts that had each been more along the line of sixteen hours. Exhausted, she’d hit the sack minutes after getting home.
The last thing she’d been expecting had been to be awakened by a text message. The phone number wasn’t one she recognized. If this was some sales advertisement she was going to scream.
Fighting a yawn, and her vision blurred with sleep, she touched the screen, opening the message.
Hello. If that was for sale, sign her up.
All traces of sleep vanishing, she stared at the text. More aptly at the photo burning her screen.
Burning her eyes into flaming orbs.
Wow.
She glanced at the number again and racked her brain, trying to figure out who the number belonged to.
Not one she knew.
Neither were those abs any she’d ever had the pleasure of setting eyes on in person. Ha, not even close. She only wished some hot guy would send her a picture like that. Sadly, hot or not, this was the closest she’d gotten to a bare male body outside the hospital—and that so didn’t count—since her break-up with Barry almost a year ago.
Okay, so the truth was she didn’t want some random hot guy to sext her, neither did she want her ex to sext her, text her, or anything else. It was one scorching hot man in particular she wanted paying her attention. Unfortunately, he already had an equally hot girlfriend and didn’t know Beth existed. Still, Dr. Eli Randolph was her fantasy guy, had been from the first time she’d seen him smile the day she’d started at Cravenwood Hospital a few months ago.
She wasn’t quite sure what it was about him that had hooked her so intently. Yes, he was total eye candy, but it was something beyond his looks, something deeper, something about the glimmer in his eyes, the sincerity in his laugh, the kindness with which he dealt with his patients and coworkers, and, yes, the warmth of his smile. She really liked the man’s smile. Then there was the outer packaging to all that inner wonderfulness that just made her knees weak. Eli was the whole package.
He was also someone else’s.
She would never step across that boundary. She’d been on the opposite side of that coin and it wasn’t a fun place to be. Never would she do that to someone.
Still, a girl was allowed a secret fantasy or two, right? Especially when that girl was as beat as she currently was. Perhaps she was so tired she was hallucinating the entire sext thing.
Maybe one of her friends was playing a joke on her.
A light bulb went off in her head. Sighing, she looked at the photo again. Yeah, that was a very realistic scenario now that she thought of it.
She’d pulled a prank on Emily earlier that week and her best friend had promised retribution. Hadn’t Emily mentioned a new phone application a while back where one could have their number appear as someone else’s?
Better to just ignore Emily than to encourage her. No telling what her roommate from college would do if given a little slack. Beth had learned that long before she’d moved to be near her friend when she’d wanted to make a fresh start far away from Barry and his new fiancée.
Stop sexting me, you perv.
Beth set her phone back on her night stand, punched her pillow, and prayed those sexted abs made an appearance in her dreams. At least in her dreams she should have a fabulous sex life, right?
At any rate, Emily couldn’t accuse her of showing how desperate she actually was. Her life, particularly her love life, was boring, boring, boring. Her best friend knew that and kept encouraging her to quit letting a man who didn’t know she existed hold up her love life. Problem was, no real-life man measured up to her fantasy guy.
Emily also frequently voiced that Beth might have subconsciously become fascinated by someone out of her reach so she didn’t have to move on beyond what had happened with Barry so she wouldn’t get hurt again. Wrong. She was so over that jerk who’d screwed her over. She knew not all men went back to their old girlfriends. Anyone who met Dr. Eli Randolph would know exactly why she’d become fascinated by him. It didn’t have a thing to do with her old hang-ups. The man was mega-hot and brilliant to boot.
Still, she really should take Emily’s advice and get a life outside work. Maybe she would go out with that guy from Administration who’d asked her to dinner a few times. She closed her eyes, saw a flash of blue eyes, curly brown hair, and a smile that took her breath away—all of which did not belong to the admin guy, but instead to a certain fantasy doctor.
Now wide awake, she rolled over in bed, picked up her phone and decided she might as well tell her friend she was onto her.
Leaning back against the leather sofa he’d sunk onto, Dr. Eli Randolph wondered just how low he’d gone.
Grimacing, he stared at the reply to his idiotic accidental text message.
Obviously not as low as he was going to go.
He raked his fingers over his tired eyes and shook his head in frustration.
He should have known better than to have taken that picture, much less considered sending it to his ex-girlfriend … or whomever he’d sent the bare-bellied photo to.
He’d been erasing Cassidy’s phone number one digit at a time, retyping it, time and again, wondering what was wrong with him that he couldn’t be happy with such an ideal-for-him woman, that her unexpected sext message and photo hadn’t provoked any of the right feelings inside him when logically it should have. She was a beautiful woman. What was wrong with him? Berating himself for not being able to love her the way he should, he’d hit a random number, realized what he’d done and gone to erase it, but had accidentally hit send instead.
He’d sent an inappropriate photo to a complete stranger whose phone number was one number off his perfect ex-girlfriend’s.
Perfect.
There went that word again. Tonight the word nauseated him.
Everyone was always telling him how lucky he was, how he had the perfect girlfriend, how he and Cassidy were the perfect couple, how he had the perfect life. Perfect. Perfect Cassidy. He’d dumped her a couple of weeks ago because of … he didn’t know why, just that he had told her they should start seeing other people.
Truth was Cassidy was the perfect woman. He’d spent three years of his life with her and had imagined he’d grow old with the pretty blonde hospitalist. Yet recently, when she’d started hinting about a ring, questioning why they hadn’t taken that next step, something had held him back. For lack of a better explanation, he’d told her they lacked physical passion. Tonight, she’d sexted him in ways that should put physical passion into any relationship. He’d wanted to feel something, but hadn’t. Knowing the problem lay within him and not within perfect Cassidy, he’d toyed with the idea of sexting back, to try to make himself feel something, anything. What was the worst thing that could happen?
He frowned at his cellular phone. What indeed?
Never
