especially now that he’d made her lips quirk in an unwilling smile more than once.
It’s fun to try to make Brooke Brown smile, but it’s fun to make every beautiful woman smile. No difference.
The grapevine had said she was seeing someone at this hospital when he’d first laid eyes on her last September. He’d been dating a nurse at a different hospital. Their game had started off innocently enough, just verbal sparring. It had never gone further. Heck, they never dropped the professional courtesy of addressing each other as Dr. Brown and Mr. Bishop.
Through the fall and winter and spring, nothing had changed, although the grapevine now said Dr. Brown was no longer seeing anyone in particular. Of course, Zach and the nurse at the other hospital had parted ways long ago. He always ended a relationship while things were still friendly, before any drama could develop.
This long-standing flirtation with the sexy librarian-teacher-doctor at West Central wasn’t any kind of relationship, so it was completely drama-free. In other words, it was safe. Zach didn’t want an emotional relationship, and Brooke Brown, MD, was no threat in that sense. They didn’t care for one another beyond their running joke.
Go, then. This isn’t the way you play the game. You crack a joke if she happens to be on duty, and then you leave. Why are you sticking around now?
He wasn’t. He was leaving. As soon as the coffee was ready, he’d pour himself a cup and get the hell out of Dodge, before he did something stupid and tried to take this non-relationship to the next level.
He thought about her too much. With their first call of the day, Engine Thirty-Seven had been directed to another hospital, and Zach had been disappointed to lose the chance to see Dr. Brown. To tease her. To try to make her smile.
That was a red flag in his book. Zach loved women, and women loved him. But to start thinking exclusively about one woman, to be obsessed with one woman?
Been there, done that, never doing it again.
The steady drip of the brewing coffee built momentum, filling the carafe. He just needed a few more minutes.
When dispatch had directed Engine Thirty-Seven to take Harold Allman to West Central, Zach had felt a little extra adrenaline rush: Dr. Brown could be on duty.
Red flag.
Yeah, yeah. The coffee’s still brewing. I’ll be out of here in a few minutes.
When it came to Dr. Brown, he always seemed to linger a few more minutes. As she’d handled Harold’s code, Zach should have left the room. He should have gotten out of the way immediately. Instead, he’d stood at that door and watched her for a minute longer. Then for five minutes longer.
Watching Dr. Brown’s cool concentration had stirred something in him, something more than physical attraction. He was impressed with her. He’d almost felt proud of her.
And yes, her abilities as an emergency physician made her even sexier, damn it. He’d thought she was sexy the first time they’d locked gazes last September. Now it was April, and the problem wasn’t just that he found her sexy. The problem was, every other woman no longer seemed as sexy to him.
Hell, if enough red flags aren’t waving for you, then you might as well stick around and make a fool of yourself over a woman for a second time in your life. Fall in love, get down on bended knee. I’m sure rejection won’t hurt as badly the second time. Stay and enjoy that pain again.
To hell with the coffee. He was leaving.
Zach grabbed the doorknob and pulled.
Dr. Brown was on the other side, holding that side’s knob. The force with which Zach pulled the door toward himself pulled her into the room as well.
“Oh,” she said, looking up at him in surprise. She only looked up a few inches. Although he was tall, she was, too, and she always wore heels with those pinstripe skirts under her white coat.
They stood there, each holding their side’s doorknob for a long, mute second. Zach let go and stepped back.
She came in and shut the door. “I was looking for you.”
His surprise was genuine. For eight months, he’d been bringing patients into West Central. For eight months, she’d been ignoring him.
“I wanted to tell you that your decision to under-dose the morphine increased the odds in Harold Allman’s favor. Thank you. And thank you for sticking around after the handoff. I think the way you kept him calm also kept him out of severe shock.”
Dr. Brown had never spoken two complete sentences to him. Zach wasn’t sure what to make of it. She wasn’t flirting, not like other women did. She was just talking to him. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Her gaze held his as she spoke. She didn’t come close to batting her eyelashes, not one flutter, but he noticed how thick they were, anyway.
“Not a lot of people would have held a patient’s hand like that,” she said. “Especially a... Well, I was going to say especially a man wouldn’t hold hands, but that would be gender stereotyping, wouldn’t it?”
Gender stereotyping. Did she have to speak like a sexy librarian as well as look like one?
“Forget I said that,” she said. “It was a job well done, whether you’re male or female.”
Apparently done for the day, she began unbuttoning her white lab coat, starting with the button at her chest.
Damn, damn, damn. He was definitely male.
Through the kitchen was an even tinier room, one that held a cot and a few metal lockers. It was the physician’s lounge, in theory. In reality, it was just where the doctors stashed their belongings. Dr. Brown stepped toward the lounge door, unbuttoning as she walked.
There was no way Zach was going to leave while an attractive woman was removing clothing. He leaned back against the counter.
Since he couldn’t just stare at her, he kept the conversation going. “I denied the patient adequate pain relief, so it seemed like the least I could do was let him squeeze the hell out of my hand. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt. The old guy could grip as hard as a female patient I had last year. She was in labor, and she nearly broke my hand with every contraction.” He paused and grinned at her. “But if that sounds like gender stereotyping, forget I said that.”
And then it happened. What the corniest pickup lines or the cleverest zingers couldn’t accomplish, a simple conversation could: Brooke Brown smiled. She laughed, actually. Laughed as she shrugged off her white coat and let it drop down her arms.
Go. Leave now, before you fall too hard.
He couldn’t just turn tail and run. That wasn’t how they played their game. It would look odd. He needed to spar with her. Keep things normal.
But he stayed silent, mesmerized by a Brooke Brown who was neither focusing on medical care nor glaring at him while the rest of her staff flirted with him. She reached behind the door for a hanger, a woman doing a common task that shouldn’t have been so fascinating. He didn’t look away
