Hot Doc: A Secret Baby Romance (Loving You Again) Read online

  Hot Doc

  A Secret Baby Romance

  Sofia Finn

  Copyright © 2021 by Sofia Finn

  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.

  Contents

  1. Maddie

  2. Maddie

  3. Cage

  4. Cage

  5. Maddie

  6. Maddie

  7. Cage

  8. Cage

  9. Maddie

  10. Maddie

  11. Cage

  12. Cage

  13. Maddie

  14. Maddie

  15. Cage

  16. Cage

  17. Maddie

  18. Cage

  19. Maddie

  20. Epilogue

  21. Desiring Boss Daddy Sneak Peek

  1

  Maddie

  If I wasn’t already convinced that there was a deity somewhere that hated my guts, the sight of Cage Burke’s menacing glower convinced me of it.

  Of all the places.

  Of all the times.

  Of all the people.

  Fucking Cage Burke was my new boss.

  I mean, I suppose I should have known something like that would happen that day. The day had already been a shitshow from the start. I woke up to discover my alarm clock had been mysteriously unplugged in the middle of the night, and I had slept in for almost a whole hour. Of course, it wasn’t really a mystery. I knew the deed had been done by a precocious little 3-year-old, determined to thwart my plans of starting her at preschool that morning. It was confirmed when I finally jumped out of bed to find her in the living room, watching cartoons and blinking her big blue eyes at me.

  “It’s late, mommy,” she said with her voice that could melt ice. “You slept in.”

  “I know I slept in.” I walked to her, hands crossed over my chest, trying out my best stern face. “Care to explain why?”

  A mischievous smile quirked her lips, but she shook her head.

  “Uh-huh, right.” I tried not to smile back at her. I really needed to up my “strict parent” game because she was clearly going to be a menace in the future. But she was just so adorable. It was difficult to get mad at her for anything, really. “Ok, up. Come on, move your butt. It’s time to get ready for preschool.”

  “But it’s late, mommy,” Ela protested as I shuffled her towards the bathroom. “I can’t start preschool when it’s late.”

  “Sure, you can.” With an efficiency borne out of experience, I got her undressed and in the tub in five seconds flat. “We’ll just tell them that someone accidentally turned off mommy’s alarm so mommy couldn’t wake up on time and she wouldn’t have to go to preschool.”

  “But I don’t want to, mommy,” she whined as I scrubbed. “I don’t want to go to school. Why can’t I just stay here with you?”

  I couldn’t help but smile then. I wrapped a towel around her and scooped her up. “Because mommy has to work, and you have to go make new friends.”

  And then, as we completed the rest of the morning ritual at a record pace of about six minutes, Ela made her case as to why she didn’t need new friends and why she could just stay at home by herself till I got back. Apparently, because she was three, she was no longer a baby and could stay home alone. It was a compelling argument—one that went on even as I dropped her off. Luckily, the front desk lady understood the tardiness and even winked after I’d explained the situation. I’d hoped my new bosses at the hospital would too.

  But given that my new boss was Cage Burke, it didn’t seem fucking likely. Especially after I blurted out, “What the hell are you doing here?” As if the fact that he was in scrubs and a doctor’s coat wasn’t a clear indication.

  “I could ask you the same thing.” His voice was a roll of rumbling thunder that matched his stature, more suited to a heavyweight MMA fighter than a pediatric surgeon. He crossed his arms as he glared at me; the sleeves of his top stretched tight across his bulging form.

  “I…I’m the new nurse,” I stammered. “The nurse supervisor told me to come up here to speak to the lead surgeon.”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” His eyes scanned me from head to toe. “You’re the new nurse?” His tone was full of disbelief.

  I knew what he was probably thinking. Who died and made wild Maddie Flynn, party girl extraordinaire, a nurse? He likely still remembered the drunken parties Ben and I had thrown back in the day. Once, the rager had truly gotten out of hand. The rest of the partygoers had started trashing our place, and Ben had been high out of his mind. A fight had broken out, and I remembered not knowing what to do. So I called Cage.

  He’d shown up like a storm of calm, took control of the situation, and efficiently dispatched everyone with unquestionable authority. All the while, he looked at me, with my tear-streaked face and clothes hanging askew, with disgust. I knew what he saw then. A screw-up. And Cage Burke despised screw-ups. Especially screw-ups dating his brother.

  Oh, this was most definitely going to be a shit show.

  I shivered as his piercing blue eyes scanned me, clearly finding me wanting. “You’re late.”

  “Um….yeah, I had to take my d—” I almost slipped up and said daughter, but caught myself at the last minute. “—my friend to the train station.”

  An arrogant eyebrow cocked. He knew I was lying. “This is a very serious hospital, Ms. Flynn. We take on a lot of rare and time-sensitive cases. We don’t need someone on the team who’s just going to show up whenever she feels like it. Is that clear?”

  I swallowed and nodded.

  “This is your one and only warning.” He turned away abruptly and picked up a paper chart from the wall cabinet. “I have surgery in an hour. Get started with prepping.”

  I choked. “You want me scrub in?”

  “Do you have a problem with that, Ms. Flynn?”

  “I thought…” It was my first day. I had assumed that it would mostly be an orientation to the hospital EMR system, maybe some preop and circulating. The possibility that I would have to participate in a whole ass surgery never even crossed my mind. I mean, sure, I had scrubbed and assisted before as a student, under the supervision of a very experienced preceptor who could easily jump in if I was doing something wrong. And it had been okay. I’d also aced all my licensing exams. So, in theory, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.

  But to be quite frank, I hadn’t built the mental fortitude to swim in the deep end of surgical nursing yet. Sure, most of what I would be doing was handling equipment, but even that made the nerves dance in my stomach. What if I picked up the wrong one? Or dropped something? What if I forgot the count of how many instruments we brought in and something somehow ended up getting sewn up in someone’s body? I’d heard the horror stories of that happening, and it could very well turn out to be me too. I didn’t want to screw up, especially in front of him.

  But I couldn’t say any of that, not in hopes for any kind of assurance anyway. Cage Burke didn’t understand things like nervousness; he would judge it as remiss. He already had a horrible impression of me. I didn’t want to make it worse.

  I swallowed the protest, nodded and said, “Yes sir.”

  “Good. Tell one of the nurses to show you how.” He gave me another one of those probing glances and walked away abruptly.

  I immediately went to see the nurse manager, who assigned me another nurse, Tessa, as my preceptor. She was supposed to make sure I did everything right that day.
Tessa clearly didn’t enjoy her job because she complained about several annoying aspects of her role rather than really paying attention to me. When I finished and asked if she could double-check that I had everything down, she rolled her eyes at me.

  “Listen, Red,” she said, using her new nickname for me. “Wash up, put everything out and have it ready by the time Dr. Burke gets there. It’s not that hard. Just don’t fuck up, or Burke will have your ass canned.”

  My heart leaped in my throat. “Does he fire a lot of people?”

  “Oh yeah. One time, a nurse, Mary, got her dosages mixed up and nearly gave one of the patients a TID instead of a BID. It was only cough syrup, but still. Burke was furious, and he fired her on the spot.”

  Yup, that sounded like Cage. Although with what she told me, I could understand why he did it. Had it been any other medicine, it could have been a fatal error.

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Tessa continued. “He’s not a total nightmare like some of the other doctors. But he is a hard-ass and doesn’t tolerate any mistakes whatsoever. Also, don’t flirt with him. Lots of nurses try to do that, and he hates it. He always fires them.”

  I couldn’t imagine even having a normal conversation with Cage Burke, much less flirting with him. Although, I could totally understand the appeal. That sculpted face and body exuded raw animalism that was like potent pheromones drawing females to him. Sure, whenever I saw him, my heart raced in fear, but I couldn’t deny there was something about him that also made my panties wet and my hormones surge up.

  Cage Burke was a whole damn presence.

  “Burke doesn’t really date either. Although…” Tessa leaned in conspiratorially. “A few weeks ago, at the annual hospital gala, I think I caught him looking at me a couple of times. I was wearing this red dress that just looked like sex on my skin, and I could tell he wanted me.” She leaned back with smug satisfaction. “Since then, there’s been this sexual tension between us. I figure it’s only a matter of time before he jumps my bones or something.”

  “Nurses.”

  The clipped tone had us both jumping. It was Cage.

  “Is my room prepped?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, stuttering. Shit, why do I lose every inch of self-confidence in his presence?

  “Both of you, come with me,” he said. “One of you will assist; the other will scrub.” Then without a word or glance at Tessa, he walked away.

  Tessa nudged me in the arm. “Did you see that? He totally wants me.”

  I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort, but I didn’t answer. Besides, I couldn’t speak past the ball in my throat.

  I followed Cage to where a stocky doctor stood likely as the first assist, suggesting that it might be a complex case. After we’d gotten scrubbed in, we entered the theatre to find the surgery tech and anaesthesiologist discussing in one corner. Cage looked thoroughly focused as he scanned his notes on the board. A little boy laid on an operating table in the middle of the room.

  I couldn’t help but be drawn to the boy. He had dark hair like Ela and was only a couple of years older than her. His eyes were closed, and he looked so tiny and alone, laying there amongst all these tubes going in and out of him. It made my heart ache.

  There was a feeling of apprehension that magnified after I entered the room. The OR—Operating Room—was intimidatingly large and with all sorts of machines beeping at different intervals. Worse, there were equipments I hadn’t learned about in school. I tried to press down the rising feeling of inadequacy. I knew about most of it, but I still felt green. I was a fresh grad after all, so I guess it made sense. Still, I couldn’t help feeling like I should have been more prepared than I was at that moment.

  In addition to that, there was Caleb. Even though he hardly looked at me, I knew he was aware of me, knew he hadn’t forgotten who I was. He would never forget that girl, drunk out of her mind, who had thrown herself at him even though she was dating his brother.

  If he knew about Ela… fear caused a thundering in my chest.

  He would take her from me.

  I hid her existence from the Burke family for a reason. I know moms usually retained custody in most cases, but the Burkes had friends in high places. They came from old money, and Cage was worth billions of dollars. If he knew about Ela, he would find someone to have me declared unfit, get a court order and snatch my little girl from my arms.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  His eyes looked up and met mine suddenly, and it was like he could see right through me. It was like he could look at all my fears and doubts, all that I was thinking and feeling. I stepped back in shock. Unfortunately, it sent me right into the medical cart behind me, full of freshly sterilized surgical instruments.

  In a cacophony of clatters, it all came crashing down.

  The deafening silence that followed was the most oppressive I’d felt in a while. Finally, it was punctuated by Tessa saying with a sigh, “Seriously, Red? You had one job.”

  2

  Maddie

  I stared at the mess in horror.

  “Oh my God.” Without thinking, I rushed to pick up the instruments, tossing them back on the cart as my heart pounded so fast. “I’m so sorry! I don’t know why I did th—”

  “Stop.” The icy tone had me frozen. My heart stopped in my chest. I turned back.

  The look on Cage’s face was pure, unadulterated contempt. “Get out.”

  “But…” I scanned the faces, and everyone was staring at me with a combination of annoyance and pity. “I’m sorry…”

  “Get out!” Cage barked again, and I jumped. With a brief nod and an even briefer apology, I dashed out of the room.

  After I shut the theatre door behind me, I leaned on it, taking in a much-needed breath. Mortification washed over me as I heard movement inside, probably the other nurse cleaning up after my mess. Most of those instruments were now unusable, probably thousands of dollars worth of loss. And even worse, they would have to go through the entire process of obtaining new ones from CSSD. I knew it could take up to thirty minutes, delaying the surgery even more.

  God. I brought my shaking hands to my face. I hadn’t messed up so badly in a long time.

  I need a drink. That old treacherous thought slithered into my consciousness. The voice was always there, in the mind of every alcoholic, even those like me who hadn’t touched a drop in over three years. It remained, always ready to turn me back into that girl, passed out on somebody’s couch while the world went on without her.

  I tamped down the temptation. I wasn’t that girl anymore. I had a daughter who relied on me. I had a job to do. And I couldn’t just check out when things got hard.

  And boy, did they get hard.

  The disaster in the OR really set the tone of the day. Obviously, I never got over the nerves because I was rattled while charting and made stupid mistakes I had never made before. It was petty stuff like mixing up patient’s charts and misspelling common orders. I couldn’t remember any of the rooms during the tour and had to ask for direction a thousand times. I could tell the nurse manager, Carol, was trying to be patient with me, but eventually, even she began to get exasperated. It all came to a head while I was having lunch.

  “Hey, Maddie?”

  I turned back to see her entering the break room with a sympathetic smile on her face. “Yeah?”

  She sat across from me, folding her hands on the table. “So…”

  A feeling of dread hit. “Oh no, you’re firing me, aren’t you?”

  Carol didn’t answer but cocked her head curiously. “Do you want to explain what’s going on today? Because all your references from training and your professors suggest you were exceptional in the OR. You also aced your CNMR, and every single one of your nursing professors raved about you. That’s why we hired you despite your relative lack of experience. But this…isn’t what we expected.”

  Ouch. I knew she didn’t mean it as a jab, but I felt it anyway. I also felt an overwhelming need to expla
in myself to her. There was something about Carol, an aura of warmth she projected that made me want to spill out my soul to her. Maybe she would understand.

  It’s Cage’s fault. I wanted to cry out like a teenager. It’s all Cage’s fault!

  “It’s my daughter,” I told her instead. “She made a huge fuss this morning about starting kindergarten. She also unplugged my alarm, so I got up late. I guess I’ve just been flustered the whole day because I really want to do well. After all, this is a really great hospital to work for. Still, I didn’t feel like I was ready to assist in a surgery, and I felt like I needed a little bit more time to get used to it and…” I took a breath before delivering the final nail in my coffin. “The pressure kind of got to me, I guess.”

  That’s it. They’ll have to fire me now. A nurse had to be good under pressure. We were trained to always be ready for anything, unflappable in tense situations. That hadn’t been me that day.

  That has never been you, my mind mocked with dreadful accuracy. I mean, as a student nurse, I was excellent, but that might have only been because someone was watching my back in case I messed up, which made everything easier. But in the real OR, it was all on me, and the pressure was clearly getting the best of me. It always had. It’s what started my problem with alcohol in the first place.

  “Sorry, I’m not the awesome nurse you thought I was.” I tried to smile through the bitter words, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded.

  Carol reached out and took one of my hands. I looked up in surprise to find that there was no judgment in her expression. Only understanding.

  “Nobody is,” she said. “At least, not at first. You should have seen my first shift. I was assisting in a delivery, and I tell you, when that thing just splashed out of there….” She shook her head. “Most terrifying moment of my life.”