“And because you can’t help yourself, you took the bet knowing you’d win, and it got infected and he landed in the ER,” Jane guessed.
“Bingo. But don’t worry, I’m putting the twenty into his tip jar when we leave.”
Jane laughed. Charlotte couldn’t resist a good bet that she knew she could win, but she also couldn’t take advantage of anyone—she just wasn’t built that way. “You work in the OR. So how did you find out?”
Charlotte’s cheeks went red. Fascinating. Jane pointed at her. “You and Mateo have been talking.”
“No! Well, not about patients. I . . . um, happened to be with Mateo in the staff room when he was paged, and I might have gone with him to the ER, since I was having a slow night.”
“Mateo and Charlotte sitting in a tree,” Jane sang. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .”
Charlotte was head down on the table, ears flaming. “You’re a child.”
“Yep.” Jane stood. “I’ve gotta go and so do you.”
They walked out into the parking lot together. They’d gotten another foot of fresh powdery snow overnight.
“Stay safe,” Charlotte said.
“Always. And right back at you.”
It was a common refrain between them. Jane hit the road heading up to Starwood Peak urgent care and got caught behind a snowplow, which meant she made it to work with barely a minute to spare. She hit the job running and never slowed down.
Starwood was Jane’s least favorite of the five, mostly because it tended to draw the hotdoggers, the reckless, the worst of the weekend warriors—which meant her day was filled with knee, shoulder, and leg injuries. Plus, there was an ever-higher ratio of what she privately called the splat syndrome—when people who weren’t expert skiers or boarders attempted to ski the fresh powder off trail in the trees. Then went splat against those trees.
They could be horrifyingly serious injuries, which meant calling for the helicopter to get them airlifted to either Reno or Davis, depending on how many minutes they had to save them—a grim reality that wasn’t in the glorious, exciting promo ads for Lake Tahoe. The staff often reduced the tension by playing pranks on one another. Last week, Dr. Daniel Briggs, a known asshole to nurses far and wide, had decided he needed his own microwave because the nurses took up too much of their short lunch breaks heating up their food. And no underlings—nurses—were allowed to use his microwave.
For a few days, Jane and the others had debated on a way to prank him without getting caught. They came up with lots of plans, all discarded because Dr. Briggs had been known to get people fired for looking at him cross-eyed.
Charlotte had helped Jane come up with a brilliant plan. She’d changed his autocorrect settings in Outlook, so whenever he typed his title—something he did all day long, every time he entered patient info—his name autocorrected to Dr. Daniel Briggs, his eloquence, master of duck herding, and debater of microwave etiquette.
He’d not been able to point the finger at anyone, so Jane lived to prank another day. And better yet, Dr. Briggs wasn’t on today. But the clinic was unusually cold, and not just because people kept coming in from outside, where the temp hovered around twenty-eight degrees. There was something wrong with the heating system, so she was working in her scrubs with her down vest on top.
In the vest pocket sat the sugar plum fairy ornament. Every time the small flat box pressed up against her ribs, a mixed bag of emotions hit her. Emotions she wasn’t sure she could name even if she’d wanted to. She tried to go with angry, but somehow she was having trouble sticking with that.
On her break, she decided it was time to be a grown-up. So she sneaked into the supply closet—because nothing said grown-up more than that—and pulled out her phone to send a text.
JANE: Need to talk to you.
LEVI: Not that I’m easy, but when and where?
JANE: I get off at 6.
LEVI: Or you could wait for me to assist in the getting off . . .
JANE: Are you flirting with me?
LEVI: Depends on if you liked it.
LEVI: . . .
JANE: Okay, maybe I liked it a little. Leave me a text on where to find you. I’m going to go home and change first.
LEVI: Don’t change on my account. I like you just the way you are.
Since she had no idea how to respond to him—well, okay, her body knew exactly how to respond to him—she did as she should have when she got to work: she turned off her phone and went back to her shift.
At six fifteen, she headed out to the parking lot and stopped short at the man leaning against her car, boots casually crossed, head down doing something on his phone. Long before he could have heard her coming, he looked up and unerringly landed that see-all gray gaze on her.
She faltered, then lifted her chin and strode directly toward him. Remember, you’re not happy he gave you a present. You’re not at all charmed. This is pretend. Just pretend. Presents have no place in a pretend relationship. Especially presents that make you feel decidedly . . . un-pretend-like.
And here was the thing. She’d spent most of her life living by certainties. The sun would rise, and no matter what part of the world she was in, she rose with it and went to her job. Then she’d go to bed and stare up at whatever ceiling happened to be over her head and tell herself that even though much of her life hadn’t been ideal, she was doing her part to make people’s lives better.
But then a certain blizzard had put her in a situation up close and far too personal with the man watching her approach. A man who had no place in her regimented, planned-out world. None. And as un-grown-up as it was, she felt a stirring of frustration with him for standing there looking like the best thing that had ever happened to her.
So she did what she did. She went on the defensive. She went toe-to-toe with him, pulled the box out of her pocket, and pressed it against his chest. “We agreed this isn’t real, so why in the world would you do this?”
He opened the box and looked at the ornament, nothing showing on his face.
She stared into his eyes. Okay, not his eyes. She stared at his mouth. She didn’t know why. “Your turn to talk,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Well, thanks to my niece, I know this is a sugar plum fairy from The Nutcracker. Although I gotta say, you make a far cuter one.”
“Why, Levi?”
“I don’t know. Why did you tell me you didn’t want to kiss me the other night, when all you’ve done since you got out here was look at my lips?”
Gah! She jerked her gaze off his lips, then rubbed her hands over her face. “I swear, I have no idea what that is.”
He looked at her for a long beat, then set the box with the ornament on the hood. “This is why,” he said and nudged her up against the vehicle. Moving slowly, clearly giving her time to resist, he reached out and removed her sunglasses. Then he closed the gap separating them and kissed her. Slow. Sweet. Almost as if he was asking a question.
Her heart drumming in her ears and throat, she pulled back and stared at him, her only thought being that this hadn’t been nearly enough. Reaching out, she grabbed the front of his jacket and yanked him back into her. He went with the forward momentum, letting them bump into each other, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, and everything deliciously in between. “This is just a kiss,” she informed him, her voice annoyingly soft and breathy.