All of Me Read online

  * * *

  Galen was waiting for the question she knew was coming. She’d brought this adorable-as-fuck, straight first-year to the roof of the hospital, which overlooked what was arguably the best view in Boston. Not a tourist or even another hospital employee was even close. She was slick as hell. And subtlety was not her strongest trait. Galen once again reminded herself she couldn’t fuck the interns. Her father would have an absolute fit if she did. Besides, it wasn’t only about her father. The last thing she wanted was to find herself once again being questioned for her motives like Rowan had done the other day.

  “How many girls have you brought up here?”

  Galen sighed loudly, the sound dissipating into the night wind. There it was. “A few.”

  She’d thought about lying. It would be easy enough. Hell, she was good at it. But Rowan was too smart for that. She deserved too much more.

  “I mean, I don’t care. It’s not like I need to be special or anything.”

  Galen contained a small grin. She couldn’t help but like the way Rowan actually did seem to care. A lot. After a decade of seducing women, Galen had fine-tuned a couple of things—most important, how to figure out when someone wanted her. The skill saved her from rejection and sent her now well-honed flirtation skills in the right direction. And unless she was wrong for the first time in a while, Rowan wanted her. Not that it mattered. Of course she couldn’t act on her urge. She was her intern. She had a boyfriend. For fuck’s sake, she hadn’t even been with a female before. Those were three incredibly good reasons for Galen to keep her scrubs on.

  “But you are the only other surgeon.” Yes. Three incredibly good reasons. Yet Galen found herself wanting the hell out of this girl. Rowan smiled shyly at her and then looked at the ground. She ran a hand through her hair, and as she did, the wind caught ahold of a scent Galen could only compare to sunshine and line-dried cotton and lavender. Something about it reminded her of childhood summer vacations and a life before medicine, a life not filled with impossible expectations. The scent transcended into a feeling—one that made her skin burn and her muscles ache to be touched.

  Rowan looked up at her again, and it was clear Galen had been staring. She’d perfected the art of lying to women. Her words were clear and smooth and always believable. But her face…that face gave her away every time. And she knew Rowan could see everything she’d just felt. For a moment, she felt naked and exposed—something only her father could usually cause. But the moment didn’t last. No. The back of Rowan’s hand, which ever so gently brushed Galen’s cheek, easily overshadowed it. That same feeling of lavender and sunshine penetrated her entire being until she was too terrified to move, afraid she might break whatever was transpiring between them. Rowan was the straight one. Rowan was the one with Brian. She would definitely have to be the one to make this happen.

  Forever seemed to pass as Galen waited. By her quick estimation, there was a solid 60 percent chance that Rowan would yank her hand away, mumble something incoherently, start crying, and run back inside. But she had to see for herself. She tentatively brushed a rogue piece of hair from Rowan’s face, grazing her jaw. That seemed to be all the encouragement Rowan needed. They suddenly jolted forward in time, as if they had been frozen and were finally free. Rowan placed her other hand on Galen’s face, held it firmly, and pulled her to her lips with a certainty that was hard to deny. For a small-town, straight first-year, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing.

  Her mouth met Galen’s tentatively at first, brushing her lips against hers like a whisper. But then the whisper built into a scream, and Rowan’s mouth parted, hot and wet, her tongue gliding slowly over Galen’s. Galen’s breath shortened, and a small moan slipped from Rowan, the warmth between Galen’s legs doubling. Kissing never got her this heated. Something visceral in her took over, and she slid a hand up under the hem of Rowan’s scrub top, letting her fingers graze her smooth, soft skin. Rowan gasped and pulled away, yanking the top back down and rushing to tame the hairs that had strayed from wandering hands.

  “Ohmygod…I’m so sorry. That should so not have happened. You’re…I’m…fuck. I’m just sorry.” She stood so quickly she had to steady herself and took off toward the door.

  Galen didn’t chase her. She’d seen this coming from three states away. In all her years of seducing women, Galen had also learned that this was par for the straight-girl course. Still, she’d never quite been kissed like that before.

  Chapter Six

  She’d done some stupid things before. No question about that. At a party in high school, Rowan once smoked half a pack of Virginia Slims in a matter of hours, mostly because that’s what she’d seen her grandmother do, and she assumed that was how you smoked them—consecutively. She’d spent the remainder of the evening bent over a trash can surrounded by her peers’ intractable laughter. During medical school, she’d taken Aderall from a friend who promised she’d be able to study for three days straight. Instead, she once again found herself reacquainted with the trash can, this time with accompanying heart palpitations and cold sweats so debilitating she failed her first and only pharmacology exam. No, Rowan was not immune to stupidity. Even an IQ of 136 did not make her infallible. And never had that been more evident than that particular night.

  What the actual hell was she thinking, kissing Galen? As if it wasn’t enough that she’d just cheated on Brian, she had to do it with her boss—her very female boss. Not that Galen screamed femininity or anything…Damn it. She was getting off course again. Rowan was essentially in hiding, thinking that one of the empty exam rooms in the deserted surgery clinic might offer some reprieve from her utter humiliation. She lay on her back on one of the cots, the stiff paper that offered a sanitary covering for patients crinkling as she shuffled anxiously around. The lights around her were dimmed to near darkness, with a couple of lone EXIT signs the only thing to risk blowing her cover. It was now three fifteen am, and her head was far too hazy to even begin to process what had just happened.

  Just like she approached everything in her life, Rowan dissected the one enormous problem into smaller, more digestible pieces, attempting to examine all the parts before forming a single unifying diagnosis.

  She told herself to start at the top—the biggest of the pieces. Nothing mattered more to Rowan than her career. And at the helm of that career right now was Dr. Galen Burgess. The same Galen Burgess she had just essentially seduced fifteen minutes earlier. Seduced? No. That wasn’t quite right. She’d kissed Galen. But it was hardly as if Galen had pushed her away. If she was remembering the moment correctly, which, she had to be honest, was about a fifty-fifty chance, given the utter shock she still found herself in, then Galen had more than welcomed her advances.

  As she stretched her arms behind her head and closed her eyes, she could almost feel those soft, warm lips as they touched hers with just enough pressure to ignite a heat in her that warmed her entire body. Galen gave just enough, sliding her tongue against Rowan’s, letting them dance for only a second, and then pulling back, leaving Rowan physically hurting for more. Galen was her boss. And what had transpired was completely, unequivocally inappropriate. But goddamn it, could she kiss…

  “You could potentially hide from me for the rest of the night, but hiding for the next five-and-a-half years might prove a little more difficult.”

  She shot up bolt-straight, like being awoken from a nightmare, at the sound of Galen’s voice. Boston City Hospital had 487 beds. How could she have possibly found the one Rowan was occupying?

  “How’d you know?”

  “I didn’t. I just thought if I was trying to escape from my boss, who I’d just kissed, I might come here.” Galen sat down beside her on the hard bed.

  “I’m so sorry, Galen.”

  “Your accent. Where did that come from?”

  Rowan involuntarily locked eyes with the wall in front of her. Great, one more thing to be embarrassed about. She’d spent years ridding her speech of her dreaded Texan
drawl. She was convinced it made her sound dumb and uneducated. By her junior year of high school, hardly any trace of it was left, except when she was nervous. Had she just seen the first of the return of her accent, which would likely emerge every time Galen was around?

  “Can I possibly beg you to pretend I didn’t just do that?”

  “You think you’re the first intern to put the moves on me?” Galen couldn’t be serious…could she?

  “I…”

  “Okay, so you are. But you don’t need to beg me to let it go. Shit happens. Especially around here. I like you. You’re a good surgeon. No harm done.” Galen patted Rowan softly on the shoulder and stood up, leaving Rowan now totally embarrassed. “Oh, and Duncan?” Galen turned back as she reached the exam-room door. “I have to say…that was one hell of a kiss.”

  * * *

  The hospital was finally asleep. It was somewhere near four thirty am, although Galen wasn’t sure exactly. She wore a watch like it was a part of her own skin, but she’d forgotten it at home that day. Something had her all out of sorts lately. She sat in her desk chair and perched her feet up on her desk. She couldn’t believe it had been five years since she started her residency. Six, technically. In hopes of pissing off her father, while still feeding her need for a near-constant dumping of cortisol and adrenaline, Galen had tried her hand at emergency medicine. She’d spent one year in the EM residency program at Boston City before succumbing to her hatred of chaos, mess, and drug seekers, and switching to a surgical residency.

  Much to her chagrin, surgery was in her blood. Her father was a surgeon. His father was a surgeon. She had two older sisters who’d gone off to get married and live sensible suburban lives—one a physics professor at MIT and one a yoga instructor with four kids of her own. It was no secret that Henry Burgess was more than a little disappointed that he seemed to be unable to produce any male offspring. Apparently, it didn’t occur to him until 1980, when Galen was born, that women could also be surgeons. And, although there would never be a Dr. Henry Burgess II, he could groom Galen to be somewhere close to it. Galen wasn’t even the smartest of her siblings. But she was tenacious. And she wasn’t sure how much of that quality she had been born with, and how much of it she had manufactured.

  Regardless of how she got there, Galen often found herself here, in her office chair at four thirty am, reflecting on how glad she was that she had. Surgery was where she belonged.

  “Get any sleep last night?” Teddy didn’t bother knocking, and Galen wondered when he had become that kind of friend.

  “The usual. Rounds so early?”

  “My roommate has some chick over. I finally gave up on listening to them bang sometime after four am. I have no idea how he can hang that long! But if he keeps this girl around, I’m going to be putting an air mattress in here and moving in.”

  “My office? Dream on. Do you know how valuable this little piece of real estate is?”

  “Not firsthand, no. But I hear they accept payment only in blood, sweat, and/or tears. Checks made payable to Dr. Henry Burgess, Chief of General Surgery.”

  Galen laughed. “Bingo.”

  “How was the night, anyway?” Teddy asked.

  “It was…well, it sure wasn’t boring.” She smiled, the smallest, most unprofessional part of her wishing she could kiss her little fledgling maybe just once more.

  * * *

  Makayla must have spotted Rowan across the cafeteria retrieving her five thirty am bucket of coffee. She’d gone home and slept a measly nine hours, got up, prepped three days’ worth of salad and peanut-butter sandwiches, and began reading up on her next scheduled case. So much of her was dreading going back to the hospital and seeing Galen. But so much more of her was looking around every corner, hoping she’d run into her.

  “Hey! How did it go?” She liked Makayla. Rowan had already decided that. But she really wasn’t great at interacting with anything with a pulse before her first cup of coffee.

  “What?”

  “Um, your call shift? Obvi.” Did she really just say obvi? Rowan wondered just how much younger Makayla was than the rest of her intern class.

  “It was fine.” She dumped five sugar packets into the dark pool, followed by a stream of cream that turned the coffee the color of eggnog.

  “I heard it was more than fine.”

  Rowan stopped short, gripping the lid of the paper cup. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t be humble, Texas. I heard you basically ran point on an appy.”

  She sighed so loudly she figured half the cafeteria had noticed. “Oh, right. I mean, yeah. Kind of. Galen let me place the trocar sites, and once I was in, she showed me how to manipulate the camera and the graspers at the same time. And then I put in the staples.”

  “So you basically did everything.” She couldn’t tell whether Makayla was happy for her or fighting back a wave of jealousy. Probably somewhere in between.

  “Not everything, no. She made the cut.”

  “So cool. How many other surgical residencies do you know where first-years get to do all that? I have a friend at Penn. They barely trust her with the camera. It takes an act of God for someone to hand her a knife.”

  Rowan had to admit, it was a pretty phenomenal experience—one that had been tremendously overshadowed by the also-kind-of-phenomenal kiss she’d shared with her boss. “Yeah. Anyway, we should go. Can’t be late for rounds.”

  * * *

  “Who’s following Mr. Jeffries?” Galen had led her pack of five bleary-eyed first-years down the hall of the fifth floor and stopped in front of room 513, where an elderly man sat upright in his hospital bed working a crossword puzzle.

  “I am.” Makayla stepped forward.

  “Right. Go for it.”

  “Mr. Jeffries. Eighty-two years old. Came in yesterday with diffuse abdominal pain and nausea times three days. CT revealed small bowel obstruction—”

  “Where?” Galen asked.

  Makayla’s face blanked, and her color seemed to drain onto the tile floor. “I…”

  “It’s not enough to know that it’s an SBO, Makayla. You have to know where it is.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t remember.” Galen hadn’t realized Makayla had the ability to be so humble.

  “The obstruction is proximal. Just distal to the duodenal junction. And why would we have suspected that Mr. Jeffries’ bowel obstruction was proximal and not distal?”

  “Because of the location of his pain,” Jordan Phillips, one of Galen’s least-favorite and newest showboaters, blurted out.

  “His pain was diffuse, Jordan. Think before you start vomiting up answers.” She hated being a hard-ass. Especially in front of Rowan. But it had been done to her, and to every other surgeon who became successful. It was a rite of passage. It was necessary. “No one? Come on, guys. This is basic knowledge. Surgery 101.”

  “We could have suspected it’s a proximal obstruction because he was vomiting profusely.” Rowan stayed toward the back of the group, but her eyes met Galen’s unapologetically.

  “And why is that, Duncan?”

  “Gastric content and fecal matter back up proximally from the duodenum to the pyloric sphincter, causing nausea and vomiting, rarely helped by medication.”

  “What is the most likely cause of Mr. Jeffries’ SBO then?”

  “Adhesions, probably. He had an open cholecystectomy thirty years ago and probably has some pretty wild scar tissue in there.”

  Galen felt herself smile. “Treatment?”

  This time, Rowan took a step forward. “Nasogastric tube to relieve the pressure in hopes of reversing the volvulus and avoiding surgery.”

  “Excellent. And what are the indications for surgery?”

  Rowan was silent now, the tension quickly muddying the air around all of them. “I…I can’t remember.” She slinked back behind the very tall Makayla, whose color had finally returned.

  “You’re off the hook, Rowan. I’ve harassed you enough for this morning.” Galen k
new how the interrogation was supposed to go. It was a long-standing term known as “pimping.” The attending surgeon, or senior resident, asked questions about the procedure, disease, or patient, each question getting more difficult. The goal was to fail. In fact, the one doing the pimping was not supposed to stop until the victim on the other end was unable to successfully answer the question. The tactic was designed to humble and belittle, until the recipient wanted to run off and cry, or bury their nose in every medical textbook they could get their hands on. Galen wasn’t entirely convinced the process did anything to benefit the education of young surgeons. But it was the way things had always been done. So it was the way she would do it too.

  However, if Galen had been following the true spirit of pimping, she would never have “let Rowan off the hook.” Was she being soft because she wasn’t her father or because of that moment on the rooftop she’d spent with this particular pimpee?

  * * *

  Rowan was waiting for Galen outside of OR 4. “Perforation, bowel ischemia, or failure of the obstruction to resolve with bowel decompression.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Perf, ischemia, or no resolution with an NG tube.”

  Galen pulled her surgical mask off and tossed it into the trash. Her short waves clung around her ears where her scrub cap had been, and a fine shine had settled over her forehead. She looked as if she had just been out for a run, and Rowan found it oddly sexy. She’d allowed herself to process why she’d been willing to kiss the woman in charge of her. Over the last several days, she’d chalked up the mishap to impulse, adrenaline, and a little hero worship. She could live with that. But she hadn’t allowed herself to delve into Galen’s pronouns. Never in her entire life had she found herself attracted to a female—not that she was in any way admitting to being attracted to Galen.

  “Still not following you, Duncan.” Galen patted her face with a towel and rotated her right wrist in small circles, wincing. “I swear, if I keep up these hours, I’m going to have carpal tunnel by the time I’m forty.”