Dr. Hottie: Bad Boy Doctors Book 2 Read online

  The waitress slipped behind the counter and handed me a menu. “What can I get you to drink?”

  “What you’ve got right there in your hand smells great.” I checked her name tag. “Sue.”

  She grabbed a mug and poured a cup of steaming coffee. “Even better if you add this.” She pushed the sugar jar toward me and turned and disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen. I heard her calling out food orders before it stopped swinging.

  I never put sugar in my coffee. Thanks to grueling med school schedules, I’d grown accustomed to it being straight black. But for some reason, I scooped two large scoops of sugar into my cup with a smile.

  “Mind if I take this seat?”

  I was about to tell the stranger I was waiting for someone, but it was Noah standing there, his hands on the barstool. I frowned up at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Hoping to have dinner. Would I be imposing too much if I sat next to you? Not waiting for someone, are you?”

  He waited as I stared up at him in confusion.

  “No,” I said slowly. “Go ahead.”

  He slipped onto the seat and held out his hand. “I’m Noah.”

  After a brief hesitation, I shook his hand. “Raegan,” I said, feeling unsure.

  “Nice to meet you, Raegan.”

  Sue came back out, asked Noah what he wanted to drink, and poured him a cup of coffee. He also got a menu, and the whole time I was watching him, wondering if this was how it could work.

  Could we really start with a clean slate? Begin again at square one with our real names?

  Of course, I knew it could never be that simple. But as I watched Noah talk to Sue, I decided I wanted to at least try. So once Sue grabbed her coffee pot and moved off to serve others, I said, “Noah, you said?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Noah Alexander.”

  “Well, Noah Alexander.” I propped an elbow on the counter and shifted to face him. “Tell me about yourself.”

  So, he did. He told me all about himself. It was strange to hear about the life of a person I knew so intimately and yet also knew nothing about. I clung to each word that fell from his lips like they were clues to a puzzle I was trying to piece together.

  He told me about his childhood. How he loved his mother and sister who were still living and how he loved his father, who’d passed away. I could feel the strength of their bond as he described his father attending every game, every tournament, every school event. Always in the front row. Always the loudest cheerer. Always his biggest fan.

  Then, when he told me about his father’s heart attack, my hand moved to hold his before I realized it was happening. He looked down in surprise and I moved to pull back, but he wouldn’t let me, entwining our fingers and squeezing. “Please,” he said.

  And I squeezed his hand right back.

  Noah continued to explain about his father’s heart attack. “At the hospital,” he said, “my mother, my sister, and me were in the waiting room. Before the operation, the doctor came out to talk to us. I’ll never forget him. He was calm and confident. I was crying, and so scared, but the surgeon’s confidence at least gave me the belief that my father was in excellent hands. I believed then that if my dad wasn’t going to survive the surgery, it would be because the damage to his heart was too great, not because the medical care was inadequate.” He sighed. “In the end, the damage was too great, and my father didn’t make it out of surgery.”

  I squeezed Noah’s hand again, and he continued to talk, revealing how his father’s death influenced his decision to go into the medical field.

  “I wanted to make him proud. It was all I thought about in high school and all I thought about in undergrad. By the time I got to med school, I was crushed by the weight of it. I wanted to be the best and save lives for him. And that pressure was breaking me.”

  Which caused him to develop anxiety in med school. Noah couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t study. He barely passed classes. His hands shook so hard in labs he lied and told his professor he had low blood sugar.

  He graduated dead last in his class.

  “But something changed during my residency. My attending surgeon instructed me to talk to the family and explain the procedure we’d be conducting. It was basic preventative surgery. Nothing that should have been life threatening. But I was so nervous, and I was shaking.

  “There was a young boy, the same age I was when my father died. After only a minute of explaining to the family, it was clear my own nervousness was upsetting him.”

  He paused as Sue dropped by to refill our coffee. Noah took a quick sip from his cup and continued. “He got tears in his eyes.”

  He paused, shifting on his red vinyl bar stool. His fingers fidgeted with the handle of the coffee cup. As I waited and watched him, I wondered, was I the first person he’d ever told this story?

  “Noah,” I said softly, “you don’t have to tell me all of this. I mean, we did just meet, after all.” I smiled and gently jabbed his elbow. I was bailing him out, but he shook his head and rested a hand on my bare knee.

  “It doesn’t feel like we just met. I walked in that door over there and I felt like I’ve known you my whole life, Raegan.”

  The hair on my arms raised at the sound of him saying my name. I wanted to hear it from him again and again and again. “Maybe from a different life,” I whispered. “A life before the mess I’ve made of this one.”

  “Do you think we were happy together then?” he asked, green eyes fixed on my own. “In that different life?”

  My whole vision tunneled down to just those eyes, just those lips. We were in a turquoise pool surrounded by thick, humid air and we were in each other’s arms. And we were happy. “Yes,” I breathed. “We were happy.”

  I’m not sure if it was my head or Noah’s that leaned in, but we were just about to kiss when suddenly there was a crash in the diner kitchen that broke the moment. We broke apart, and I tucked my hair behind my ears.

  Sue shoved open the swinging door to the kitchen and grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, dears, my son is an idiot. I’ll be right back to take your orders.”

  Noah cleared his throat, the flush fading from his cheeks as he picked up the menu and stared at it. “The biscuits and gravy are the best I’ve ever had, if that’s your sort of thing.”

  “Sounds great,” I said lamely as I fidgeted with the hem of my skirt.

  We both ordered the biscuits and gravy, and Sue convinced us to add on cinnamon rolls, two strawberry milkshakes, and a plate of hash browns. She barked our orders at the kitchen guys in the back, leaving us in awkward silence. We’d accidentally swerved into “real” life and couldn’t find our way back to being strangers meeting in a diner. But I didn’t want to be a stranger to Noah. I didn’t want to dismiss what we’d had together in the Dominican Republic to something that happened in another life.

  “What happened with the boy?” I asked quietly. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”

  Noah nodded. I think he was just as relieved as me to focus on something other than the obvious connection pulsing between us. “I do want to tell you,” he admitted after a sip of coffee. “I want you to understand who I am. In that waiting room, as I stood there with all my nerves pouring out of me and into that room, making everyone all shaken up including myself and especially that kid, I remembered the surgeon who operated on my father, who was honest about the risks but made me far less scared by his confident demeanor. So I tried to be more like that. You know. Confident, cocky, charming. Certainly not how I really felt, which was always scared.”

  I compared the Noah in the articles and photos on the internet to the man sitting beside me. This man wasn’t a showboat. He wasn’t arrogant. He wasn’t #3 on LA’s Most Baddest of Bad Boys. He was being honest and introspective. He was just trying to figure out how to make a boy not feel even more scared about the operation his father was facing.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Noah shrugged. “Well, the
whole course of my life changed. The boy stopped crying. The family seemed less stressed, and oddly, I did too. It was as if my fake bravado had calmed something in me—like acting all cocky and confident actually gave me that confidence. I always had the talent in me, I just needed to convince myself, I guess. The surgery was successful. I did good work. And I wanted to do good work.”

  “So you became that surgeon,” I finished for him.

  “More and more he became me,” he admitted, looking away. “Obviously, it didn’t happen overnight. But gradually it became a comfortable mask I put on, so I could do my job. And people liked that Noah Alexander. They wanted to dance with him, party with him, fuck with him.” He winced dramatically. “I like fucking. How was I supposed to say no to that? I’m a guy.”

  I smiled. “Girls like fucking, too.”

  “So, you get it?”

  I nodded, and my voice sounded more serious than I intended when I said, “More than you’ll ever know.”

  He dragged his fingers through his hair. “It also brought money to the hospitals I worked in and awareness for causes I cared about. I was saving lives in the operating room, so for a long time I figured what’s the harm?”

  He propped his elbows on the bar, his head tilted down, hands together in front of his face, shoulders bent. He looked remorseful, almost like he was atoning for his past sins. I could do the same, I thought. I could definitely do the same.

  “I want to find myself again, I guess,” he said finally, gripping his coffee cup. “That’s what brought me to search for you. It’s what made me want to bring you to this diner. To find the real me and be that guy.”

  His finger grazed the back of my hand. I should have moved away. But I stayed right there and we were silent. Touching. Together.

  “And here we are,” Sue announced as she emerged with a tray full of steaming plates that smelled delicious.

  We talked more, chatting about childhood stories, first kisses, embarrassing moments, med school horrors, and favorite places to eat around the world. It was easy. It was smiles and little touches and pieces of the puzzle all falling into place.

  We talked until Sue punched her time clock and slid us a piece of pecan pie on the house before waving good night from the door.

  We talked until the coffee pot was empty the first time and then the second and then the third.

  We talked until even the truckers had nodded and slipped away to their bunks.

  We talked until the light outside faded from black to a hazy gray in the misty morning.

  We talked until Noah threw a couple hundred on the bar and grabbed my hand. “Come with me.”

  Chapter 14

  Noah

  Hand in hand, Raegan and I crossed the empty highway and climbed down the sandy bank to the rocky beach. The morning fog was so thick we could barely make out the neon sign of the diner up on the hill. It also covered us in a misty curtain as we walked along the gray shoreline.

  “It’s not exactly the Dominican Republic,” I said.

  “Oh, have you been there?” she asked with a mischievous smile.

  I grinned. “I met a very special woman there.”

  Raegan raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? Tell me about her.”

  Just ahead, a large piece of driftwood appeared out of the fog. I pulled Raegan toward it. I sat down, pulled her onto my lap, and wrapped my arms around her chest. Her hair smelled the way I remembered, felt the same against my cheek. It stirred something inside me, and for the first time since I woke up to find her gone in that hotel room, I felt at peace. We watched the fog roll over the crashing waves, with dawn weakly breaking through the clouds.

  “Well, let’s see,” I started. “I’d never before felt my breath leave my body the way it did the first time I saw her. I thought I was capable of charming any woman in the world, and then I met her. All I could do was stare dumbly at her beauty.”

  Raegan traced circles over the back of my hand with her delicate little finger. “I’m sure this woman felt the same way about you.”

  “No, no,” I said, kissing her head. “She was such a unique, stunning beauty, and way out of my league. All I got was an amused smirk.”

  “Maybe she was afraid. Everyone is afraid of something.”

  I hugged her tighter, keeping her warm in the fine mist of morning. She was right. I knew she was afraid of something, I just didn’t know what. Since the day we met, there was this heaviness to her. She was carrying a weight she didn’t want to share with me. Not yet.

  I’d wait as long as it took. Or, if she never wanted to tell me, I’d find other ways to lighten her load.

  I pushed her hair from her shoulder to reveal the tanned skin of her neck. “This woman,” I continued, peppering her neck with kisses between each word, “was stronger, smarter, braver, more mysterious, confident, kinder than anyone–”

  Raegan suddenly pulled away from me. She tugged her hair back into place over her neck and stared out across the white foamy ocean. “I’m not kind,” she said, her voice distant and strained.

  “Raegan.”

  “I’m not.”

  I tried to pull her back into my arms, but she shook me off and turned to face me with dark eyes. “I’m not, Noah.”

  Her expression was serious and firm. She was waiting for me to disagree with her and she was ready to shut me down when I did.

  “Raegan.”

  “No.”

  “Come here.”

  I reached for her and she shook her head and stood.

  “Raegan!”

  She stalked off toward the shoreline and I scurried up from the dense sand to chase after her. I grabbed her arm, but she whipped away from my grasp. Then, I wrapped both arms around her and she struggled against me until we both fell to the sand, gasping and covered in tiny mist beads and white sand grains.

  Raegan buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Slowly, I scooted closer to her so that we were chest to chest, her legs behind my back and mine behind hers. I pressed her head to my chest and rubbed her back. I was grateful then for the dense fog moving lazily around us. All I could see were the distant headlights of stray cars up on the highway this early in the morning.

  “I’m a terrible person,” Raegan mumbled against my jacket.

  “What?”

  She leaned back. Tears stained her cheeks, and she sniffled.

  “Raegan, you are not a terrible person.”

  She nodded, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how stubborn she was.

  I shook my head.

  “I am. I really am,” she insisted.

  I’d told my story up in the diner on a vinyl bar stool, sipping coffee. She told hers while sitting across from me in the damp sand. But we both told our stories for the same reason: we wanted the other person to understand. To finally see us as we really were, flaws and all.

  “As a doctor I was supposed to be selfless.” She wiped her eyes. “The needs of the patients above my own. But when it came down to it, I failed. I’d tried to be selfless, but I liked the new life too much.”

  She told me about growing up buried in books and not looking at boys unless they were Alexander Fleming, Albert Einstein, or Francis Bacon. “If guys gave me any attention at all, I didn’t see it.”

  Her whole life was studying, reading, and working. She graduated top of her high school class, then top of her college class, then top of her med school class. Her residency record was spotless, and, with extremely high expectations, she was hired at UCLA. She’d barely completed her first week when famed movie director Benjamin Richter came in requiring lifesaving surgery.

  After his recovery he took her to dinner to thank her for an exceptional job. Raegan didn’t even know who he was. After all, she didn’t have time for movies. But Richter knew who she was: a star. He was immediately taken with her quiet strength, her obvious beauty, and her brilliant mind. He changed her life right then by inviting her to a party at his home in Beverly Hills.

  “I wasn’t going
to go.” She played with the sand between her legs. “But my roommate had a crush on Oliver Joyce. He’s a movie star.”

  I knew. Everyone knew who Oliver Joyce was.

  “So, we went, and I was doomed.” Raegan described that first party and the many, many, many parties after. “It was all glamorous evening gowns and sparkling champagne and flashing lights. Everything I’d never had. And I liked it. The more I got sucked into that world, the more I liked it. I looked beautiful, and I loved people telling me I was beautiful. It made me feel good. I liked spending my weeknights out at plays or concerts or theaters instead of home by myself in sweatpants. I also liked the break from the stress, the long hours, and the grueling emotional wear of being a surgeon.”

  I understood that. How could I not? Anyone pursuing our career understood that. It was taxing in every way possible: emotionally, physically, psychologically, personally. It meant stressful sleepless nights and a sacrificed personal life.

  “After I started dating Oliver, I thought he was my Prince Charming.”

  Raegan’s body language shifted every time she mentioned his name during her story. Her eyes fell from my face down to the sand, her shoulders slumped, and she chewed the inside of her lip. I hated him for that lingering effect he had on her.

  Slowly and quietly, she began describing their relationship.

  Oliver Joyce saw Raegan as a showpiece. She was the hottest new thing, and he wanted the hottest new thing. She would have a long, hard day at work, and he’d tell her to smile. “Cameras, dear.” She would have an early start the next day, and he’d insist she have cocktails with this producer or that network executive no matter how late it was. She’d be running late due to work, and he’d berate her for embarrassing him.

  “He was controlling and toxic, and I should have left him, but I was afraid I’d lose everything. And I didn’t want to lose everything. But that was the first crack before it all fell apart.”

  Then Benjamin Richter connected her with people who wanted to turn her life into a reality show. Oliver definitely wanted it and constantly pushed her. Raegan thought she wanted it too, until the tabloids dug their claws into her.