her neck had allowed.
Stop. Stop thinking about what happened in the hospital corridor earlier. No wonder her aunt didn’t believe she was capable of finding a suitable date on her own.
This was ridiculous. She could do this. Julia had never failed at a task, and she wasn’t about to get distracted and fail now.
She looked down at the empty page and began to write.
Must look good in flannel.
Must speak in a slow, sexy drawl.
Must look at me like I’m the whipped cream on his Frappuccino.
No, this was ridiculous. She tore the yellow sheet off and tossed it in the small trash can by her desk.
She rotated the pencil between her fingers, twirling it like a miniature baton. After a disastrous relationship with one of her professors a few years ago, Julia didn’t want a man at all, let alone another person to help her find one. She knew that her solitary upbringing and current avoidance of social activities was anything but ordinary. She’d never let it bother her before now. But her fitting in seemed important to Aunt Freckles. And if she wanted to be normal, or at least create the appearance of being normal on the night of the hospital gala, then she would need to put forth more effort. She looked down at a fresh piece of paper and started her list all over again, this time leaving off any references to Kane Chatterson.
She had just finished and put her pencil down when a knock sounded at her office door. Chief Wilcox, Julia’s surgical assistant, entered. “Do you have those post-op reports done? The physical therapist is already asking for them.”
“Yes, they should be in the patient’s online file,” Julia told the corpsman, who had a pink backpack slung over her shoulder and was apparently leaving for the day.
“I looked there and didn’t see them.”
“I finished them after my workout,” Julia said, pulling up the screen on her iPad. “Oh. I must not have clicked on Submit. Okay, they should be in there now. I’ll call the physical therapist and let him know.” She looked her assistant over. “You look like you’re off for the weekend.”
Even to Julia, the observation came out sounding a little too obvious. She didn’t want the woman to think she was crossing the line from professional to overly social, but how else was she supposed to get to know her staff? She told herself this was good practice.
“Oh, yeah. A few of us are doing a camping trip up near the Sugar River trailhead. I still need to pack my gear, and Chief Filbert put me in charge of KP duty, so I need to get all the food ready, too.”
Julia had no idea who Filbert was, but she was more than familiar with the hollowness circling her chest. Not that she was much of a camper, but it was her weekend off, as well, and nobody had thought to ask if she’d like to go on the trip. Same thing with happy hours or lunches in the break room. It was easier to act indifferent than to make other people see that she, too, wanted to be included in the ordinary adventures of life.
At a loss, Julia simply said, “I hope you all enjoy your trip, then. I’ll see you back here on Monday at 0600.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’,” Wilcox said before closing the door. Julia fell back against her chair and squeezed her eyes shut at how ridiculously pathetic she must’ve sounded. She remembered her first day of high school and how the students patted her on her twelve-year-old head when she’d foolishly asked several of the cheerleaders if she could sit with them at their table. Nobody had been rude to her outright, but the novelty of having a child genius as some sort of odd little mascot soon wore off when Julia easily outscored several of the seniors on their honors English midterms.
College hadn’t been any better, especially since she was studying adolescent brain development while her own brain hadn’t finished the process. Guidance counselors who didn’t know what to do with such a young scholar told her things would get better for her socially once she got older. But by the time she started med school, she no longer cared about what others thought of her and found it easier to simply hang back and observe. She had her cello, she had swimming, she had her books and her studies. She didn’t have time for homecoming games and celebratory drinks after final exams—even if she had been old enough to be admitted into the bars with the rest of her classmates.
A career in research had been on the horizon until she’d seen a documentary about women in the military.
She’d attended Officer Development School soon after her parents died, the order and regulation of the Navy reminding her of her regimented childhood and serving as the perfect antidote to Julia’s hesitancy to fraternize. She easily told herself that she wasn’t jealous of her staff’s camaraderie or the fact that she looked for reasons to sit here in her office and work instead of going back to the lonely officers’ quarters and microwaving a frozen Lean Cuisine before falling asleep on her government-issue twin-size mattress.
So why was she all of a sudden starting to worry about any of it now? She undid her ponytail and massaged her scalp before turning to the tile samples she’d set on the credenza behind her.
Julia ran her fingers over the glazed surfaces of the colorful porcelain pieces. Kane had suggested neutral colors because they added to the resale value. While some of the decorating magazines she’d perused pushed the idea of an all-white bathroom, the surgeon in her worried that she would grow tired of the sterile and clinical feel of such a contrast-free environment.
Julia brought the blue-and-green mosaic strips to her desk and propped them against some medical texts so she could get a better look at them. If they laid the glass tiles in a running bond pattern in the shower, she could use both colors, but would it overpower the white cabinets and the large, claw-foot tub in the center of the room?
She shook some more Raisinets out of the box as she contemplated the color scheme. Not that she was the type who turned to food for comfort—Fitzgeralds didn’t need comforting, after all—but during med school, she’d found that she thought better when she snacked.
Unfortunately, no amount of snacking could get Kane’s voice out of her mind. She tried to ignore the warmth spreading through her at the memory of her body’s response to his assessing stare outside the gym.
The sooner she made a selection, the sooner she could get back to more important things—like picking a dress for the hospital gala and finding an appropriate date to take with her. Preferably one that didn’t look at her as though he knew exactly how much she wanted those sexy, smirking lips to...
Julia snatched another handful of candy, determined to distract herself from thinking of his mouth, only to have her focus shift to the blue-green glass tiles that were the exact same shade as his eyes. If she chose that color, would she be sentencing herself to a lifetime of showers feeling as though his penetrating gaze was surrounding her naked body?
She reached for the plain white subway tiles before changing her mind and grabbing her smartphone. After taking a quick picture, she fired off an email to Kane in an effort to prevent herself from wasting any more of her time with such dangerous and unproductive thoughts. And to stop the sound of his slow drawl calling her darlin’ replaying over and over again in her mind.
* * *
It was after eleven o’clock, and Kane’s brain had yet to slow down enough to make going to bed an option. Usually a day’s physical labor followed by a long, mind-numbing run after dinner was enough to tire him out sufficiently so that it would take only about
