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“Dedicated to your work,” she finished my statement for me.
“Well, I am. It’s true.”
“And you know what that’s going to get you? A whole bunch of loneliness.”
“I’m not lonely. I have Lucy.”
“I love Lucy, but she’s not as handsome as Evan.”
“Evan?”
“Just rolls easily off your tongue, doesn’t it?”
“Doesn’t change the fact that he seems to be kind of a jerk.”
“I don’t think he means to come off that way. He really does care a lot about his job and his patients. His personality just seems a bit—what’s the word? Strict? I’m sure it has to do with his background though.”
“What’s his background?”
“He used to be in the military.”
“Ahh,” I said, nodding. “Yeah, I’ve known quite a few military. Had some in my family. They can be a bit rigid, but that never made them outright rude.”
Molly chuckled. “I think you just caught him off guard. You know how doctor egos can be. Not all of them are Dr. Nualli.” She leaned forward and whispered, “They can’t always take it when we’re smarter than them.”
I laughed. Suddenly, my day felt a lot better.
“Well, I don’t know about you, Tessa, but I’m going to get on out of here. My presence inside these walls is no longer contributing to my bank account at this hour.”
“All right, Molly. See you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 4
Tessa
“Hey, there girl! How’s my girl?”
Lucy eagerly greeted me with a wagging tail as I walked through the door to my home. Lucy was a pit bull with a heart of gold who I had adopted from a local animal shelter four years ago despite everyone trying to talk me out of it.
“Do you know how dangerous pit bulls are?”
“That’s no dog for a pretty young woman like you. Get something a little more classy, like a poodle or a Yorkie.”
“Pit bulls are a lot to handle. Do you plan on having children someday? Do you want to bring them into a household with an aggressive animal?”
And on and on the criticism went. Yet, I couldn’t be deterred. From the moment I met eyes with Lucy, whose eyes were nearly the same shade of blue as mine, I knew she was my doggy soulmate. The moment the papers were signed and I brought her into my home, she had been nothing but a bundle of love and joy. And although she can be protective when necessary, I had yet to have any serious aggression problems with her. Lucy was living proof, as far as I was concerned, that with proper love and care, there was no such thing as a bad dog. The worst she had ever done was chew up a couple pairs of my old sneakers when she’d been left in the house too long while I was at work.
After jumping up and down and covering me with doggy kisses, Lucy spun around in a circle exactly three times before running to the back of the house to retrieve her leash. She seemed particularly eager to go for her run, or perhaps she sensed my need to blow off some steam. The day’s shift at the hospital had not only left me exasperated and irritated, but with plenty of pent-up frustration as well.
“Just give me a second to change clothes, Lucy,” I said, heading for my bedroom. She skipped behind me, her nails clicking on the wooden floor.
I pulled a t-shirt and shorts from my drawer and gratefully shed my hospital scrubs, kicking them into the corner of the room with the rest of my clothes that needed to be washed. Seeing how tall the pile had grown, I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Living alone had changed my habits quite a bit. Back in my younger college days, when I regularly had roommates and occasional booty calls, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with a pile of dirty clothes lying in a visible spot. But now, especially after particularly busy shifts in the emergency department, I would shed my clothes and sometimes could barely muster the energy to kick them into the pile.
While I loved almost everything about being a nurse, the one thing I considered the biggest inconvenience was the surplus of dirty laundry it regularly created. It seemed that wearing scrubs five days a week would reduce my laundry pile, but that was not at all my reality. I quickly learned that they were called scrubs for a reason; they needed constantly scrubbing. Every week, I was bound to come home with some kind of disgusting mystery fluid dried up somewhere on my clothing. Hence, nursing was not for those with delicate stomachs.
“No, Lucy,” I said, seeing that she had been just moments away from jumping into my ever-growing pile of colorful and dirty scrubs. “That’s not lady-like at all, you know.”
She tilted her head at me as I slid on my jogging sweatshirt. As I stepped into my running shoes, she excitedly jumped up onto her hind legs, knowing it was finally time to go.
