Accidentally Dating His Boss
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Kristine Lynn
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CHAPTER ONE
MARY POPPINS WAS full of crap.
Because no amount of sugar—or booze or miles on a solitary beach run—was going to make this easier to swallow.
Dr. Owen Rhys groaned into his steaming cup of coffee before taking a sip.
“Son of a—” he hissed. It was so hot it numbed his lips, but not before scorching them.
Come on, he pleaded with the universe. Give me at least one break today.
He was a doctor; he knew better than to sip coffee straight out of the pot in the same way he knew not to overthink an email. But thinking logically about the latest missive polluting his inbox wasn’t possible, not with his mind spinning a thousand curt responses he’d like to fire back. If he wanted to jump-start unemployment, that is. He scanned the email again, his eyes finding the most egregious parts to hone in on.
...moving the meeting back until ten to put out some fires...
...time to shake up the way we do things at Mercy...
...need to be innovative with the ways we invite the press into our practices...
The email was system-wide, sent to every chief, doc, surgeon and resident, but the last line in the second-to-last paragraph seemed like it was written directly to him.
No department is immune to the changes coming our way. Not even those that bring in the most revenue or whose notoriety has given this hospital a certain reputation with elite clients.
It might as well have said, Dr. Rhys, pay special attention to this part. Because it’s your fault for sleeping with Emma Hartley in the first place. Maybe if you hadn’t, she wouldn’t have come to you for help and our hospital wouldn’t be front-page news next to “botched surgery” in last week’s paper. Ciao!
Without thinking, Owen took another sip of his coffee, which hadn’t cooled since he’d tried to singe his skin off thirty seconds earlier. He cursed and put the cup down. Caffeine wasn’t gonna make this email disappear anyway. His gaze shifted from his computer to the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News. It wasn’t any better.
Emma-freaking-Hartley.
Chalk it up to another idea that seemed good at the time but decidedly...wasn’t. Despite his no-dating directive—a byproduct of chronically disappointing people in his life—he’d let their one night together stretch into a few months of fun. It lasted as long as “fun” in Hollywood usually lasted, and he and the A-list actress had parted ways amicably. So, when she came to him for help with a scar from a surgery that had gone bad at a no-name clinic in the Valley, of course he was going to help her.
Regret came swift and heavy. Sure, he was the one who helped Emma lessen the scar, but of course, some photographer had followed her to his office and the news had gone nuts with speculation.
Had Owen caused the original scar? Was he sneaking her in after hours to fix his own mistake? And other asinine questions.
It was a damn nightmare.
Never mind the personal boundaries they’d crossed to get the photos—the paparazzi’s invasive presence brought Owen’s past screaming back into the present.
Owen shuddered as the memories assaulted his subconscious.
He sat down, his knees weak as he recalled his brother Sam being hounded by a reporter after his accident—an accident Owen caused when he left a boiling pot of water unattended on the stove. In an attempt to finish the dinner Owen started, his younger brother accidentally hit the pot, sending the scalding liquid over his neck and torso.
Even now, Owen could still hear his brother’s screams of terror when he tossed and turned at night...was still plagued by Sam’s weakened shouts from the hospital bed when the reporter had snuck in.
He rubbed his arms, suddenly chilled.
Then there was the court case where his family sued the overzealous reporter for harassment of a minor in his hospital room, his home and on his way to school. His family had won, but at what cost?
Sam had spent two years after his injury afraid to go outside. His parents spent every waking hour tending to Sam’s health behind shuttered windows. Meanwhile, Owen lived as a ghost in his own home, haunting dark rooms with guilt-ridden silence until he was old enough to drive, which meant old enough to go to parties. If he was going to live life invisible to the people he loved the most, his future smothered by remorse, he wasn’t gonna be sober for it.
Owen rubbed at an ache behind his ribcage; if it weren’t for that one party, that one neighbor talking some sense into Owen...who knew where he’d be now?
Even though he’d pulled himself out of a spiral, it had been too late for his family. The uneasy feeling of prying eyes followed them everywhere they went until Sam moved away, as if his younger brother’s injury wasn’t enough to endure. They’d never recovered.
And now, twenty years later, the same thing was happening with Emma.
Her affair with Owen—and her original surgery—were splashed all over the news thanks to his notoriety as a plastic surgeon and her starlet fame. No matter how many times Owen commented publicly that her botched surgery was not performed by him, or anywhere near Mercy, his face was splashed all over the media.
Exactly what he’d been trying to avoid his entire career.
“Dammit,” he cursed. He’d never see the media as anything other than a cancer of modern society.
Sure, a degree of notoriety helped book the surgeries he needed to keep his public career afloat, but that work only mattered because it funded the pro bono medical work he did anonymously for the nonprofit he’d created. Since Sam’s accident, his ability to help burn victims and domestic abuse survivors who couldn’t afford medical insurance would always be his priority. He couldn’t stop the accidents themselves, or the media that covered them, but he sure as hell could help the patients who needed him most. Each save was a pound added to the scales of justice.
And the “Emma situation” had put it all at risk.
Until, out of the blue, the story was washed away with a one-liner from Emma’s PR team, and then buried in the side column of today’s paper like it’d never happened.
The curt statement thanked Owen for his work to help the actress and boom—just like that, his name was cleared. For that, anyway.
So why was the headline next to the front-page article worse somehow?
Mercy Hospital—Known as the “Hospital to the Stars” by Greater Hollywood—Revamps its Image with a New CMO at the Helm.
Because it could do more damage to my nonprofit than the Emma story did, and the anonymous work I do after leaving Mercy each day is about to fall under scrutiny. Not to mention I’m just now finding out this new chief medical officer’s plan at the same time “greater Hollywood” is.
The story beneath the headline was worse still. Dr. Kris Offerman—his new boss—flaunted her plans for a new trauma center at Mercy that would do the same work Owen was doing. She’d invited local police officers harmed in the line of duty to her announcement; they’d be the first to receive free, world-class medical attention the minute the center opened. In return, their stories would be shared as part of an ongoing Changing the Face of Medicine docuseries in a partnership with LATV.
On the surface, the tweak to Mercy’s business model seemed like a move that would finally synchronize Owen’s medical practices. He could move his nonprofit patients to Mercy and give them the best standard of care at one of the premier hospitals on the West Coast.
But, again, at what cost?
The patients he saw at the clinic didn’t want their names dragged through a news cycle. They just wanted help and to go home and live normal, scar-free lives like his brother should have been able to do.
Bottom line? The outreach was a good thing, the fact that Offerman needed to advertise it, a whole other. If she pursued the media part of the trauma center plan, he wouldn’t be a part of it.
He’d give her the benefit of the doubt, but the story in the news didn’t bode well.
Dammit.
He raked his palms down his stubble-lined cheeks. What was he supposed to do if she marched ahead with this foolhardy plan?
The way he saw it, he had two choices.
First, he could hold tight to his moral compass—the one pointing him in the direction of doing good for the sake of doing good, rather than for the accolades it drummed up—and fire off a resignation letter to his boss. He had enough money saved up that he could keep the nonprofit clinic open for almost a year.
What then?
He was a damn good surgeon, but good enough to withstand the questions from future employers about why he’d quit the most coveted job in the country?
He reread the email, stopping at the part where Offerman mentioned needing everyone on board for this to work. He hadn’t even met the woman in person and she was already living up to her name. Dex, his best friend and Chief of Psychiatry at Mercy, had called her “a fixer,” which translated to a hard-ass.
Owen’s second choice was more complicated. He could stick around for a few months and see what came of the trauma center. Maybe if he was on the inside, he could exact meaningful change with the way Offerman saw their patients. Maybe he could convince her to practice like he did—out of the public’s eye and with only the patient’s well-being in mind.
Hmmm. He reached for his coffee again, but decided against a third scalding.
The thing was, Owen started off his career wanting to help burn victims like Sam—patients who didn’t have the resources Emma did. But he kept that part of his life quiet on purpose. It wasn’t for show; it was to change lives. Hell, he’d even let the Mercy Telegraph—what he called the gossip train at the hospital—believe he left work early to party or vacation or whatever else they drummed up instead of what he was actually doing. Namely more surgeries for people who could never afford American healthcare’s steep prices.
It wasn’t any of their business how he spent his time if his work was getting done.
Until now. He had a sinking feeling Dr. Offerman would make it her business.
What will it mean if I stay at Mercy, if I move the nonprofit over and Offerman publicizes it?
A spotlight wouldn’t just be on his clinic and his patients, but on him, too. For years—since he was a teen in the aftermath of making the biggest mistake of his life—he’d operated in the shadows. There, he could do the work without expecting praise or accolades he neither deserved nor wanted. He did what he did because circumstances demanded it. End of story.
“Ugh...” he groaned.
“Spoonful of sugar,” my a—
A chime from the laptop interrupted his less-than-kind thoughts about his new boss. Because that particular chime he’d handpicked for one notification and one notification only. A new message from @ladydoc.
A shiver ran up his spine the way it always did when he heard that sound. Funny that over the past six months, that feeling hadn’t dissipated at all. If anything, he’d grown more excited when he heard from her.
Which was silly if he thought too much about it. He didn’t know her real name, where she lived or even what she looked like. But since the day they’d met on DocTalk, a forum for anyone in the medical field to chat about frustrations, network, even date, he’d been drawn to @ladydoc. They agreed to stay friends when it became pretty obvious both of them needed one, and that was more than enough for Owen, who definitely didn’t do relationships. He barely even did friends.
Online, he could talk freely without worrying what it would do to his image or career. The distance of anonymity also allowed him to keep her at arm’s length. From there, he couldn’t hurt her like he’d hurt everyone else he let in. From a distance, she wouldn’t be able to see his flaws; up close they were terrifying to reckon with and impossible to see past. Everyone—his parents, Sam, even Emma—was better off with him staying in the shadows.
Nothing was at stake with @ladydoc, so just about anything was possible.
Yeah, but what if she saw past your mistakes? his subconscious asked.
He shook his head. Nope. Because then he’d have to learn to forgive himself and there weren’t enough patients left to save in the city for that balancing act to happen.
He clicked open the message.
Hey there, @makingadifference. Wanted to thank you for the doughnut recommendation. I live at DK’s now, if you ever want to find me, haha.
He smiled. DK’s, huh? He’d given her three doughnut places to choose from and she’d visited the one two blocks from his house. She was closer than he thought. They’d never broached the subject of meeting up in person, but now that he was 99 percent certain she lived in northwest LA, the possibility hit him upside the chest like three hundred volts from a defibrillator.
He typed out a response, his blood pressure spiking. Not a good sign for a surgeon, but another chronic symptom every time he eased into what had become hour-long chats each morning and evening.
Glad you liked it. It’s the best-kept secret in LA, so keep it close to your chest. We don’t need tourists finding out how good we have it, haha.
Was he the kind of man who added haha to the end of a sentence? Apparently, he was. He hit Send and then stared at the screen while he waited for a response. He was also the kind of guy who stared at the three “typing” dots instead of going on with his day.
It wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to do. He was chief of plastic surgery at one of the premier hospitals in California for one. Not to mention he had a laundry list of issues facing him at said place of employment.
Largely because he’d come close to breaking his only rule—no dating, just work—with Emma, putting the rest of his life in the spotlight. His rules existed for a reason. Life was simpler that way; he couldn’t hurt someone who didn’t exist.
Which was what made the whole six-month exchange with @ladydoc even more interesting. Being online friends meant a veil was dropped between them, protecting them both from the possibility of attachment, of romance, of more. More was a four-letter word to Owen.
Yet, knowing she was so close cracked open the door of possibility. Maybe his four-p.m. scrimmage with Dexter could provide some clarity.
Finally, the chime he’d been waiting for rang loud against his vaulted ceiling.
Greedily, he read it out loud.
“‘My lips are sealed. Well, about this, anyway. ;) Any chance you have an equally good Thai restaurant recommendation? I figure a city this big has to have a hidden gem there, too. I’ll owe you one...’”
Owen’s eyes widened even though there was no one to ask Do you see this? Did she just flirt with me? For not the first time, he wished he hadn’t kept @ladydoc a secret from Sam and Dex. At least then he could dissect this conversation with them.
But then again, sharing her was out of the question, too. She was the one unencumbered part of his life, the only person beside Dex who knew about the accident with his brother and how, after a spiral that almost took his life, it catapulted Owen into the type of medicine he practiced. The only one aware of his estrangement with his parents, and why he kept everyone at arm’s length because of it. Yet, she agreed that being alone saved you and everyone else from more heartache. That way, no one had to forgive unforgiveable offenses, no one had to pretend to be happy to see someone who’d ruined their lives and no one had to worry about what you’d be capable of next. Not even Dex was aware of that blossom of shame growing in the darkest parts of Owen’s heart, where he didn’t let in any light. Just @ladydoc.
She was special. And the only thing that was his.
Instead, maybe Dex could help him pick apart a piece of correspondence from another woman he’d never met, but whose emails were infinitely less enjoyable—their new boss.
Owen glanced at his watch. Damn. He was twenty minutes behind.
Try Thai Palace on Twenty-Fourth and Kelly. You won’t regret anything except having a new addiction. Thank me later? ;)
Did he just flirt back? Owen smacked his head with the heel of his palm.
You got it. Gotta run to a thing I really wish I didn’t have to go to. But you made my dinner plans worth looking forward to. Talk soon?
He resisted the urge to ask if she wanted to grab food together at Thai Palace that evening, just as friends. Instead he wrote back.
Looking forward to it. Gotta go, too. Rough day at the office. Wish you were here—might not be as bad then.
Owen hesitated before sending the chat message. “Wish you were here” was awfully close to I’d like to meet up.
He hit Reply before he could back out and grabbed his coffee thermos, briefcase and phone. Time to get this circus over with.
He remote-started his Audi A8 and let the seat adjust to him. Just as he was pulling out of his driveway, the phone rang over the speakers, filling the small space.
He chuckled when he saw the name on the dash.
“I was just thinking about you,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? You have another erotic dream about me I should know about?”
“Just because you get to hear about sex dreams all day doesn’t mean you’re the cause of mine, my friend,” Owen said, laughing.
“Ha! You are having sex dreams. I knew it. Told you this ‘no-dating’ thing was bad for you.”
“So’s sleeping with people if the situation with Emma is any proof. Anyway, you know the only time you show up in my thoughts is when I’m figuring out ways to school you on the court.”
“Any luck with that lately?”
“None. I’m screwed. I seriously think you hang out with the Lakers in your free time.”
“What free time? You see our schedules for this week? We have dinners planned now. Dinners. You know what that’s gonna do to my social life?”
“Move it back a few hours? Besides, you just broke up with Kelsey. Give it time before you go back to paying half your salary for a woman you don’t plan on waking up next to.”
Owen’s best friend was a serial dater, the yin to Owen’s yang. Making it worse was the fact that Dex had left his only long-term relationship because she’d adopted a child—a deal breaker where Dex was concerned. Now that he was back on the market, no female was immune to his interest.
“You’ve got a point there.”
“Besides, don’t you leave for Africa soon?”
“All the more reason to fill my love cup now.”
“Your ‘love cup’? Do you hear yourself?”
“What’s wrong with liking women? Just because you don’t—”
“I like women just fine. I just have no desire to—”
“Invite one into my life so I can hurt them eventually,” Dex finished for him, albeit in a nasally teasing tone. Owen had been repeating that a lot lately, hadn’t he?
“Touché.”
Owen turned left out of his gated community, throwing a wave to Percy, the security guard. He made a mental note to stop on his way back in tonight and ask Percy how new fatherhood was treating the man. He and his wife had been trying for two years before their infant, Jill, came along.
“Siri, schedule a gift for Percy.”
“Isn’t that the guy who works the gate at the Estates?” Dex asked when the task was complete.
“Yep. Just had a new baby.”
“Gross. I’m perpetually glad I skipped that part of life.”
“That you know of. Anyway, you’ve let me ramble on about sex nightmares, the Lakers and now my security guard. You wanna tell me why you called?”
Because it wasn’t like Dex not to get to the point.
“I, um, wanted to let you know the morning medical staff meeting was postponed.”
“I know. I got the email. Not off to a good start if she’s already pushing agendas back and having us rearrange patient care.”
There was a beat of silence where all Owen heard was the gentle purr of his engine. It felt ominous since Dex was never this quiet.
“That’s the thing,” Dex finally said. “She pushed it back again to have a one-on-one with the head of plastics.”
“With me?” Owen glanced down at his iwatch and frowned. The only thing on his calendar was the delayed staff meeting where they’d formally introduce Dr. Offerman as the CMO, and that was still an hour out. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. She came by my office just now and asked what I knew about you with respect to pro bono work and if I thought you’d be interested in taking part in the TV special.”
Owen barked out a laugh. “I hope you told her there isn’t a chance. I’m a physician, not an actor. And our patients aren’t extras—they’re people with lives and jobs and families. I’m struggling to see how this is going to be helpful.”
“So you’re a no, then.”
“Hell yeah, I’m a no. I mean, it goes against everything I practice medicine for.”
Especially after everything the media had done to his family.
“I get why you feel the way you do, but I don’t think you can afford to feel that way at the cost of everyone’s jobs.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying, it costs money to keep our hospital running and her series will generate what we need to do that. Maybe just hear her out. Not everyone in Hollywood is like that guy who violated your brother’s privacy.”
Owen’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. Needles of frustration pierced his skin.
“Whose side are you on?” Dex had never challenged Owen like this.
“My patients’. My department will be eviscerated without better funding.”
Owen wasn’t prone to anger—what did he really have to be angry about when the world hadn’t been particularly cruel to him like it had been to his brother Sam? But he felt the unfamiliar and unwelcome emotion rise like bile in the back of his throat.
“Fine.” Owen caught a sigh on the other end of the line. It wasn’t Dex’s fault this was happening, but it didn’t feel good hearing about it from his best friend, either.
“Listen, don’t shoot the messenger, Owen. I wasn’t even supposed to tell you. I’m just saying, keep an open mind and keep me updated, too.” Owen gritted his teeth as the car in front of him slammed on its brakes. Of course the LA traffic would come to a standstill a mile from the hospital. His day had turned from crap to a dumpster fire pretty quick. “You know, you could tell her about the work you’re doing at the—”
“No. That’s none of her business. I do it because it’ll help folks, not save my skin. I’ll think of something.”
“Better do it quick.”
Owen glanced out the window at the looming shadow of the place he used to consider home.
“Right. Well, I should go,” Owen mumbled. Now he was a man who mumbled instead of standing firm and confident like he’d earned the right to be. Great. He didn’t dare wonder what else the day could hold for him in case it came too close to tempting fate.
“See you on the court later? I leave next Monday for the Africa trip and want to kick your ass one more time.”
“Sure,” Owen said, then clicked off the call. For the umpteenth time that morning, he wished for two things.
One, that he’d never checked his email that morning.
And two, that he’d had the forethought to ask @ladydoc for her phone number. As he headed into the lion’s den at Mercy Hospital that morning, he could really use a friendly voice.
