“What isn’t?”
He stood and took her hand, pulling her back to the edge of the wall.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“My first act as your boyfriend is to get you safely to the ground.”
“Pretend boyfriend,” she corrected, and then screamed all the way down.
Chapter 10
Charlotte cranked up the radio and mainlined a huge mug of black coffee to keep herself awake as she drove home from her shift. She was coming off twenty-four straight hours in the OR, and thanks to the season and all its icy snow, she’d been on her feet the entire time.
Car accident victims had arrived on top of car accident victims. Heaven forbid people slow down or take the road conditions into account as they leave their cities and hit the mountains. Nope, they were on vacation, so caution went out the window.
She used the drive home to decompress. She breathed deeply and calmly, sang along with the radio even though she couldn’t carry a tune, and did her best to stick with happy thoughts. All to shed off the horrors of the day, the shocking and devastating results of those accidents that rivaled any episode of Grey’s Anatomy she’d ever seen.
By the time she parked at the top of her driveway, she felt almost human again, and out of habit, glanced over at Mateo’s house. No vehicle in the driveway. He hadn’t been on shift, but he wasn’t home either. At the crack of dawn.
Doing her best not to think about whose bed he was in if he wasn’t in his own, she let herself inside her house. It was quiet. Empty. She knew Zoe and Mariella were at work. She had no idea where Jane was. There was a stick-it note on the fridge in Jane’s scrawl that read Don’t worry.
Jane’s idea of letting Charlotte know she was alive and okay.
In truth, it was a huge step from the beginning years. In those days, Jane hadn’t understood that Charlotte actually cared about where she was and if she was okay. So Jane’s leaving a note now was the equivalent to shouting out from the rooftops that she considered Charlotte family. Her feral wolf cub was growing up enough to realize that other people might actually worry about her whereabouts.
Progress.
She was a decade older than Jane, but if you compared Jane’s life experiences to hers, Charlotte was the youngster. Still, she loved to smother Jane in affection, because one, near as she could tell, Jane didn’t let anyone else do it, and two, because it was fun to watch Jane squirm trying to figure out how to accept said affection.
She’d planned on showering, pulling down her blackout shades, and going to bed, but, restless after her shower, she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and went out into her backyard. Hands on hips, she stared up at the roofline of her house, where her Christmas lights twinkled at her mockingly.
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s February and you’re embarrassed to still be up there.”
At work, there was always an ongoing bet of some kind or another for comic relief. Charlotte was rarely the instigator, but she almost always was the winner.
She couldn’t help herself, she hated to lose. Last month the bet had been who could go the longest without a bathroom break. This had stemmed from the fact that the staff bathroom between the ER and OR had been closed due to renovations, leaving all of them having to run up a floor and use the Labor and Delivery staff bathroom as needed. They’d installed a small camera at the entrance of said bathroom to make sure to catch everyone entering so they could see who didn’t enter—and that would be their winner. They’d even installed a camera on the third-floor staff bathroom to make sure no one bent the rules.
But they hadn’t installed a camera on the fourth floor, figuring no one would have that kind of time. Charlotte had won a nice pot of two hundred bucks, thanks to the hospital president being a personal friend and having her own office and attached bathroom.
She’d won the last five bets and had no intention of losing any time soon.
The other day in the staff room at the hospital, there’d been a poll on who still had their holiday decorations up, and you couldn’t bet on yourself.
She could still remember the light in Mateo’s eyes as he’d laughingly collected the bounty because he’d been the only one to know that she had hers up.
“They light up my bedroom at night,” he told her later when they’d been alone. “Makes me think of you.”
What would he say if she told him the truth—that she thought of him too. Way too much. But she still hated that she’d lost the bet on a technicality. She pointed up at her lights. “I’m coming for you.”
They twinkled at her mockingly, and she wondered if Mateo would notice that they were gone.
He’d asked her out, multiple times. But she’d always declined. Not because she was going for celibacy. And not for a lack of interest either. She’d have to be dead and buried to not be attracted to the man whose easygoing mannerisms conflicted with his heart-stopping magic in the ER in the most fascinating of ways.
Not going there . . .
She drew a deep breath of determination and dragged her ladder from the garage to the backyard, wrestling it up against the roof. Not easy on any day, but she still had a foot of snow in her yard, even more up against the house. She snugged the ladder against the packed snow and hoped that it would make her feel more secure.
If Jane had been here, she’d have done this for Charlotte. Jane was good with ladders. Jane was good with just about everything. Charlotte was first-rate in an operating room. She was also excellent at holding on to the past, not that she was proud of it.
It was why she lived all the way out here on the West Coast. Because she couldn’t fathom living in the city where it had happened. Where everyone knew and pitied her for it. Yes, she was lonely for her parents, but she was also furious that one bad decision on one terrible night had stolen not only her trust in others but in essence her family as well.
Quite over herself, she climbed to the top of the ladder and began to lift the string of lights from the hooks in her eaves. Two minutes in, she faced a quandary. Roll them up like a lasso and hang them from her shoulder, or let them drop to the ground and possibly break.
She was still deciding on a plan of action when she heard the doorbell ring. Grumbling, she backed down the ladder.
Please let it be a food delivery.
Since she hadn’t ordered anything, the odds were against her. Stalking around the side of the house, she stopped in surprise at seeing Jane standing on the porch. She was in jeans and a thin sweater that accented her slender, deceptively lightweight figure. No jacket, no doubt because she’d forgotten it. Long wavy hair blowing around her pretty face. She had a big bakery bag in one hand and kickass boots on her feet that were a statement and told people not to underestimate her.
Charlotte certainly never did. She’d met Jane years ago at a medical clinic in Colombia, where they’d both been on a Doctors Without Borders stint. It’d been one of Charlotte’s first overseas forays, and she’d been told to expect it to be rough.
But it’d been even more of a nightmare than she could have dreamed of. One night, rebels, guns blazing, had come into the clinic to confiscate all the meds and meager amounts of cash. Charlotte had been by the door, just locking up. The rebel guarding their exit had sidled up to her.