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Drake didn’t miss several women eyeing him as he left the bar full of posh people getting their weekend started. But for some reason, he was disinterested—and had been ever since he’d started working with a curvy brunette with hazel eyes. He walked back toward the garage at the hospital, but he did have two drinks tonight. There was a little drizzle, but the hospital was only two blocks away. But as he got closer, he decided he better get a taxi. He’d never risk his entire career or someone’s life. He stopped on the sidewalk just outside Mercy.
Like a thirsty man, he conjured up an image of Margo right in front of him, his own Margo mirage. Except she was holding a huge umbrella and stood looking from side to side outside the ambulance bay. He couldn’t have ignored her, even if he knew he should. Walking through the rain, he stopped a few feet away from her.
“Do you really have a policy against dating doctors?” he asked.
“What?” she said, whipping her head around. “Drake, what are you still doing here?”
“I was having a drink with Dalton and my cousin. Why are you still here?”
“A van flipped and they have multiple victims, so I’m helping out.”
“Imagine my surprise tonight when Dalton said you two aren’t dating and you never date doctors.”
The faint sound of a siren called through the air in the distance.
“I don’t know why you or Dr. Hart would care who I date.”
“Well, he cares because he’s attracted to you, and I care because I never stopped caring.” He cringed at that honesty that slipped from him.
The rain was picking up, and his hair was drenched. The sirens grew louder, and she stepped closer to cover him with her umbrella.
“You cared so much you left for LA without a single look back?”
Her accusation was like a sobering smack. She was the one who had ended things. She was the one that chose to change all their plans.
“You said you didn’t want me anymore.”
She cursed as the sirens grew louder. They had a few more seconds before she would have her hands full.
“This is like the twilight zone. I couldn’t afford your plans for UCLA medical school when I didn’t get the scholarships. I said I couldn’t go, but you just insisted it was too late to change your plans. You left, and then you stayed away.”
“You hooked up with my brother,” Drake blurted as his mind raced to consider her version of what happened.
“No, I didn’t. I was helping your brother. Just because you left didn’t mean I wasn’t still friends with Ian. Did you really believe I would sleep with my ex-boyfriend’s younger brother? Like some tawdry revenge for you leaving me?” She took a deep breath. “I don’t date doctors because at the end of each shift, I need a break from medicine and egos. Yours is currently on full display. Go home.”
The ambulance whirled into the circular driveway, and she passed the umbrella to him. The paramedics hopped out and opened the back of the ambulance where there were two people on stretchers and a third sitting on the bench holding an injured arm.
He hesitated. He was a doctor; he wanted to help. But he couldn’t after having two drinks.
“Go home, Drake,” she ordered him before running along the first gurney back into the hospital as the paramedics rattled off the patient’s ailments.
Every impulse said to go after her, but she was working and he needed some food and to sober up if he was going to spar with her about their past. So much of what she said didn’t make sense. He did leave for medical school, but she was the one that had changed all their plans last minute. And he had no idea what she was talking about helping his brother, but he was going to find out.
Ian was his polar opposite. Where Drake had been cerebral and almost obsessive about academics, Ian couldn’t have cared less. Although Ian was equally intelligent, he lacked the desire to follow through on his academics back then. He focused on being the head of the swim team, getting girls, and finding any kind of mischief. For some reason, Ian was always in competition with Drake.
It started when they were kids. Ian would say their dad favored Drake, and at first, it seemed like an exaggeration. Later it became much more obvious it was true. It drove Ian crazy and a huge wedge formed between them, but Drake never understood why until the first time Ian got in real trouble. He was eight and accidentally set fire to their backyard, but their dad blamed Ian’s precarious nature. Their dad thrived on order and sought perfection, and Ian was a free spirit. Ian had balked at their father’s influence since birth. His mom would say Ian was her wild child, just like her, but it only justified the division.
In high school, their dad would take interest in Drake’s grades and sports, but even when Ian won the state championship for swimming his sophomore year, their father was more focused on his mediocre grades. Ian continued to get into trouble, as if disappointing their dad was a challenge. But when his girlfriend died the summer before his senior year, after sneaking out of the house and going to a party with Ian, it was the final blow. As a state attorney, their father had been furious his own son was mixed up in a huge criminal investigation. There were allegations of underage drinking and drugs. In the end, it was determined that Ian had refused to go to a college party and was at home when his girlfriend died of an overdose. But that didn’t stop everyone else from blaming him, or Ian from blaming himself. Drake was away at college, and his parents would say Ian had amped up his mischief and shut them both out.
The only way to find out what Margo meant was to ask his brother, but Drake always found it difficult to have any kind of meaningful conversation with him. After years of strain, their relationship was nonexistent. Then a few years ago, he’d heard from a friend at Mercy that his rebellious brother Ian was dating Margo. The most hurtful betrayal of all. It was like they were both twisting a knife in his back.
Even now, after they’d been broken up for over ten years, both different people, she still had so much power over him. The sting of her rejection was still there.
But for the first time, he wondered if he should have dug deeper into what went wrong. Before they found out which medical program they each got into, they had talked about marriage after medical school. He’d been elated to get into UCLA, then destroyed by her complete change of heart. She’d said he didn’t understand how stifling the debt was. But at the time, he thought it was an excuse, that her feelings had changed enough that she didn’t want to be stuck across the country with him for medical school. Then she was gone, all the plans they’d made just cast aside.
But now all he wanted was a do-over, and to be close to her, or at the very least, to understand exactly what had happened.
Chapter Seven
