Sinful in Scrubs (Scandalously Yours #1)

1. Emma

1

EMMA

I was too focused to let the commotion on the other side of the room bother me. Everyone was methodically moving around, on task. To the untrained eye, I knew it looked like chaos. It certainly had my first time in the emergency department as a med student.

I had my patient to focus on, and I trusted the staff to take care of the tasks as I barked them out. I didn’t look up and a fresh hemostat was placed in my hands. Squinting, I shifted the tissue around until I saw what I needed.

“Gotcha,” I said under my breath as the clamps snicked into place and locked down.

I held out my hand, and a second pair was in my palm.

There was a deep voice, unrecognizable to me, barking out instructions. The tone and the choice of words tripped a bad memory, and a cold sweat broke out on my brow. I wasn’t going to let bad memories of Kevin interfere with my focus. I couldn’t help it if my body decided to launch into anxiety mode with an elevated heart rate and panic sweat. At least my mind was mine and was focused on the patient in front of me.

“Damn it, where is that blood coming from?” I may have snapped, my emotions from the unwanted Kevin reminder seeping into my professionalism.

I had two clamps on the femoral artery, and the patient was still bleeding.

“Let’s get a unit on standby just in case,” I said to the nurses at my side. “I don’t like how much bleeding there is.”

“You need to apply pressure,” that deep voice that had set all my alarm bells ringing barked at me.

A shiver shook my spine. I cricked my neck from side to side, rolled my shoulders, and straightened my posture. The voice was all wrong for Kevin, but the macho ‘I’m a man, therefore I know better’ attitude was the same.

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” I looked up, daggers in my eyes.

“Pardon, Doctor?” the nurse asked.

I swallowed my words when I realized the man wasn’t talking to me, but rather instructing one of the other patients. I didn’t let my gaze linger. I had other priorities at the moment. But the quick glance I got burned the man’s image into the backs of my retinas.

My vision was full of the situation in front of me, but in my mind I could still ‘see’ the chiseled features and silvery fineness of a thick head of salt and pepper hair of the man I practically snapped at. It wasn’t Kevin. Kevin had dark blond hair and always insisted on wearing the white coat over his scrubs, even when it wasn’t practical. Tonight’s work was messy. The white coat would have been ruined.

“Sorry, sorry, reacting to other conversations. Got to keep my head in the game here.”

Pressure. He said pressure. There had to be micro fissures causing the bleeding. Wrapping my hand around the wound, I leaned my weight on it.

“Doctor?” the nurse asked.

“Just trying something out.”

“Is there time?”

“I have a hunch this will give us the time we need.” I needed to get sutures into this kid ASAP, but with all the blood, I couldn’t see where to start. If we were in an operating theater, with the proper equipment, this wouldn’t be an issue. But we didn’t have the time, and we didn’t have an available surgery suite.

I lay across the kid and counted in my head and hoped my body weight and grip would be enough pressure to close up the invisible tears causing my problems.

I eased up, lifting my torso away. “Take a look,” I directed the nurse.

“Looks like the bleeding stopped,” she said.

I stood and immediately, we started the sewing.

My grandmother had taught me to hand mend when I was a child. She taught me patience and to take precise, even stitches. That handicraft skill had followed me into my profession. While others might throw in sloppy stitches—technically, stitches did not need to be pretty—I made sure if my grandmother ever saw my work, she would have nothing to criticize.

The impromptu surgery was a success, and my patient stabilized. She was moved into recovery for observation, and I moved on to the next case.

“Dr. Chen!”

I paused when Rosa Hernandez’s stern voice grabbed my attention. I turned to see our head nurse’s wide-eyed expression. “Yes?”

“Dr. Chen, please.” She gestured at me.

I looked down. I was covered in blood. I looked like I had been stabbed. Pressing my hand into my abdomen, I grimaced. “It’s not mine.”

“Dr. Chen, please put on a fresh top. You are traumatizing our young patients even more,” Rosa said.

She was right. The immediate emergency was over. If I were going to deal with another patient, I should clean up. Normally, I wouldn’t be covered in the results of emergency surgeries. There were surgery robes and other protective wear for me to have on, but tonight’s situation hadn’t allowed for the luxury of PPE, Personal Protective Equipment.

“Thank you, good idea.” I let out a tired chuckle. I had been so focused on what needed to be done, and then what I needed to do next, that I hadn’t really noticed the blood that had gotten on me when I leaned on my patient.

I pushed into a prep room and pulled my top off. “Yuck,” I said as I dropped it into a biohazard bin.

I needed a shower, but there wasn’t time. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and began scrubbing my torso. Not too much had gotten on my skin, but still…

My skin turned rosy from the hot water and intense scrubbing I had subjected it to. Satisfied that my torso was clean, I turned my attention to scrubbing my arms up past my elbows. I had my face buried in my hands, giving that and my neck as thorough a cleaning as possible at the sink, when I heard that deep voice again.

“Oh, excuse me, I didn’t realize.” He blustered and coughed around a few stammers, and then he left.

I ignored him and continued washing in peace. A few seconds later, he returned.

“This is a prep room, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?” I dried my neck and chest as I looked at him. He was avoiding looking at me. What was his problem?

“I thought I must have walked into the women’s room.”

“Huh?” That’s when I glanced down at myself. “Ah, sorry. I was doing a quick change. The front of my shirt was covered in blood. Had to wash a bit off me.”

I was standing there in my blue scrub pants and a bra. If I wore more utilitarian undergarments, he probably wouldn’t have reacted the same. But I don’t wear practical underwear. It’s boring. And I have to wear scrubs eighty percent of the time I’m at work, so I like to wear fancy underwear. Today’s bra was sheer nude with black lace details. My dark nipples were completely visible.

I gulped and quickly grabbed a clean top from the pile of available scrubs. No wonder he was acting embarrassed. I was essentially exposed to him. What a great first impression.

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I pulled the scrub top over my head. I turned my back to him so my actions didn’t flash my nipples any more.

“You’re Dr. Emma Chen, right?”

Fully dressed, I turned with an embarrassed chuckle. “Yeah, um, who are you?”

“Marcus, Marcus Walker. Pleased to meet you.”

“And you’re a doctor?” I asked.

“I’m the new guy on staff,” he admitted.

“Oh, that’s right. They did bring on a new doctor. What a way to start your tenure at Manhattan Memorial, with a messy car versus pedestrians situation.”

“Messy? More like criminal. Those kids are going to need more than time to recover. Did the little girl you were working on make it?”

Dr. Marcus Walker leaned against the sinks as if we were chatting over nothing more than the weather or something we saw on TV the night before. He didn’t seem bothered by what he had been thrust into his first night at a new job. Now that I was clothed, he seemed perfectly relaxed. He was tall, with long limbs. Biceps bulged and strained against the short sleeves of his blue scrubs. A fading tattoo with the spiked scrollwork of the tribal aesthetic seemed to pierce his skin in its claw-like grasp. The tat ended just below his elbow, and there was a tell-tale peek of more ink work just under the edge of the neckline of his scrubs.

A wry smile emphasized his cheek bones, and his eyes were a piercing, ice-cold blue.

“She’s in recovery,” I said.

Marcus Walker was a good-looking man, and he had seemed completely flustered when I was half-naked in front of him. That was a nice boost to my ego.

“Where did you learn that trick?”

“Trick?” I asked.

“You used your body to compress her. Was that combat training?”

“Combat training?” I asked, shocked. “No. I haven’t been in the military. Have you?”

He nodded slowly. “Retired Army. Field surgeon. That kind of quick outside of the box thinking is what saves lives.”

“We have to be able to come up with nontraditional solutions in trauma care, don’t we?”

He chuckled. “We’re more creative than people give us credit for.”

“Is that what you call it? Creativity? Most people would call it detachment. I was walking around with that kid’s blood on me and the head nurse had to yell at me to go change. I don’t think she’d call me creative.”

“No, she calls you Doctor. If you need someone to talk to about our creative ways, I know we just met, but I have years of interesting ways of dealing with what we do. If you ever want to chat.”

My gut twisted as his words felt too much like he was starting to ask me out. I was not in a dating phase of my life at the moment. And I didn’t think talking trauma response with some guy who had just seen my nipples was the best idea at the moment.

“I’ll keep your offer in mind,” I said as the kindest brush-off I could come up with at the moment.