Clinically Delicious (New Haven #1)

Chapter One

Gabriel

“When does she arrive?”

“In ten minutes.”

“Is she hot?”

My eyes burned holes in the screen as I tried to understand why my best friend was the way he was.

Fitzpatrick Lovejoy—Fitz, to the rest of us, though the name felt inadequate for the man who drew a growl from my gut.

Fitz was a transplant from the damp, dull gray landscape of his birth, London, England, though he embodied none of those honorable traits.

Instead, Fitz exuded the cunning charm of Jane Austen’s John Willoughby, complete with his predatory smile and rakish manner.

He wasn’t simply a womanizer; Fitz was a force of nature.

A hurricane of libido who left a trail of chaos and broken hearts wherever he went.

From his very first year at Yale, Fitz had made his aspirations clear.

It was a chilling boast, whispered over pub tables and in quiet corners of office hallways: his ambition was to conquer every woman within a ten-mile radius.

And somehow, he had done just that, leaving behind women with shattered dreams, broken promises, soaked pillowcases, and the lingering sting of betrayal.

Fitz was a manwhore, plain and simple.

His one weakness was Winnie. She was our office manager, and every aspect of her presence made the metaphor clear: ‘sculpted from granite’ meant more than her sharp jawline or the rigid way she squared her shoulders.

It was the unwavering set of her jaw when challenged, the way she held her spine straight in every confrontation, and the calm, icy steadiness in her eyes that never flickered under pressure.

Nothing rattled her. Not Fitz’s sly grins, nor the chaos he stirred up around her.

Winnie was the only person Fitz couldn’t charm or manipulate.

That failure gnawed at him. It wasn’t just a matter of professional pride; it felt like a personal defeat.

Rage simmered beneath his carefully polished exterior.

Every time she dismissed his flirtatious remarks with a cool glance or shut down his impulsive plans with a single, unyielding word, his frustration deepened.

He pursued her approval and admiration with a relentless energy, but her resistance only made his efforts more desperate.

Their rivalry colored the air in the office.

When Fitz tried to override the scheduling protocol, Winnie would stand her ground, arms crossed and voice steady, refusing to budge even as he tried to rally support from colleagues.

In meetings, she would calmly correct him, emphasizing overlooked details in his proposals, never raising her voice, always letting the facts speak for her.

Staff learned to tense up whenever the two locked eyes; the polite facade stretched thin over a battle of wills.

The tension was palpable, but so was a strange respect.

Fitz thrived on challenge, and Winnie was the immovable object he could never defeat.

In those moments, when she refused to bend, and he refused to stop, the office became a hostile battlefield. Everyone watched, waiting to see who would yield first. But we all knew: Winnie never would.

Ignoring Fitz, I said, “Don’t care if she’s hot. All I care about is whether she’s qualified to take care of Megan.”

From the moment my daughter’s fist clenched around my finger, a primal love ignited within me.

She consumed my every thought. She was mine.

My tiny, fragile miracle, and she deserved everything I could give her.

Her mother—Tonya—well, she was nothing but a black hole full of cheap tequila, regret, and completely incapable of offering even a sliver of devotion that my daughter deserved.

I met Tonya shortly after my mother’s diagnosis. She’d been an easy, cheap thrill, refilling my glass until my world swam into a hazy oblivion. Nine months later, I was a father.

I tried. God, how I tried. But the truth, cold and brutal as a surgeon’s knife, sliced through what I had already suspected—that she deliberately sabotaged our first night together.

I had hoped that with the birth of our daughter, she would change, but when she tried to blackmail me, threatening to cut me off completely and take my daughter to sun-drenched California, I’d had enough.

The custody battle involved two years of legal wrangling, depositions, and endless courtroom visits, but ultimately, it was Tonya herself who messed up when she left our daughter unattended while she went out on a date.

In the end, I got full permanent custody, and Tonya got two weeks in the summer.

“Who recommended her?” Julien asked staunchly.

Dr. Julien Darcy, the clinic’s resident neurosurgeon, a man sculpted from granite and starch, radiated an icy precision that chilled the very air around him.

His office, a sterile monument to order, gleamed under the fluorescent hum, each file precisely aligned, each pen meticulously placed.

The scent of antiseptic hung heavy, a constant reminder of his unwavering adherence to protocol.

Julien wasn’t just a rule follower; he was a rule worshipper.

A devotee at the altar of regulation. Every comma in every guideline was sacred scripture, and woe betide anyone who dared to stray from the text.

His clashes with Nathan were legendary, eruptions of controlled fury sparked by Nathan’s infuriatingly casual disregard for Julien’s meticulously constructed world.

And then there was Vivian, Julien’s sister, a whirlwind of vibrant chaos, a living, breathing antithesis to his rigid existence.

Her presence was a splash of color in his monochrome world, a constant, maddening affront to his carefully curated order.

He loathed her, yes, but a strange, unsettling undercurrent of fascination pulsed beneath the surface of his icy disdain.

“Does it matter?” Nathan questioned. “This is the seventh nanny in a month. Gabe needs to stop running them off.”

Grumbling, I muttered, “Not running them off. I just refuse to sleep with them. Besides, I’m not too hopeful. She’s the daughter of my next-door neighbor. If she’s anything like her mother, she won’t last the day.”

“Come on, Gabriel,” Nathan sighed. “Give her a chance.”

“I am giving her a chance, Nathan. I hired her, didn’t I?”

Dr. Nathan Carter, the clinic’s resident doctor of internal medicine, was a man whose eyes held the weight of a thousand unspoken secrets.

He was the clinic’s moral compass. Or rather, the wildly swinging pendulum of our practice.

His empathy frequently clashed with the boundaries of ethics, which often drowned out the faint whisper of his integrity.

Nathan wasn’t exactly shady, not in the blatant, back-alley kind of way.

But the desperation of his patients’ pleas often saw him bending, then snapping the rules whenever insurance companies dared to withhold life’s necessities, which annoyed Julien and his strict adherence to the law and the oath we’d all taken.

Looking at his watch, Julien commented, “She’s got five more minutes, then she’s late. This isn’t looking good for her. As a hired employee, first impressions set the stage. She should have already been there.”

“Jesus, Julien,” Hayden, the oldest of us, groaned.

Dr. Hayden Walker, the clinic’s doctor of geriatric medicine and former teacher of Yale’s sterile academic halls.

Hayden had been more than a teacher to us; he was our mentor, a steadfast surgeon with years of experience and a raw talent that put him above all the rest and when the politics of Yale poisoned what he once loved, he walked away, leaving behind the stench of hypocrisy clinging to his white coat.

The University considered us a band of outlaws because we all stepped away from promising careers in our chosen fields, forgoing the glory of prestige and innovative discoveries to offer a different kind of healing, one born of the simple knowledge our patients weren’t just fucking numbers but people who deserved to be listened to and not ignored.

“She lives fucking next door to Gabe. It’s not like she has to drive across town.”

“My point exactly. What is taking her so long?”

“Maybe she wants to look extra nice.” Quinton smirked, elbowing Fitz as the two of them wiggled their eyebrows.

Dr. Quinton Wesley’s laugh lines etched around his eyes belied his shrewd intelligence.

As the resident emergency medicine doctor and cosmetic surgeon, Quinton was the office jester, a whirlwind of effortless charm and quick wit that could disarm even the crankiest patient.

But the scent of stale beer and cheap cigars clinging to his tweed jacket hinted at nights spent far from the sterile confines of a hospital, nights fueled by secrets and shadowed desires.

His laughter, a gravelly baritone, resonated in his very bones and was infectious.

But his laid-back demeanor was a carefully constructed facade, a shield against the darkness he both witnessed and carried within.

Quinton only intervened when there was a threat of violence; his calm was a chilling promise of swift, brutal justice.

The only thing more terrifying than his casual mirth was the icy glint in his eye when that mirth finally died.

Rolling my eyes at his antics, I groaned. “She’s just the nanny.”

“A potentially hot nanny,” Fitz quickly said before fist-bumping Quinton.

“Does Megan like her?” Nathan asked, concern written all over his face. “Because if she doesn’t, we don’t have a problem with her being here at the office.”

“Well...” Julien piped up, only for Hayden to smack him on the back of the head.

“Nate’s right, Gabe,” Hayden firmly stated, glaring at Julien, who rubbed the back of his head. “Ladybug is always welcome here. She makes this place better, and the patients love her.”

Exhaling deeply and pinching the bridge of my nose, I asked, “Besides my daughter, what’s the schedule look like today?

I know I have only two appointments scheduled.

The McDaniel boys are coming in an hour for their yearly well-checkups, and then someone needs to warn Winnie that Mr. Johns is bringing in the New Haven Little League Soccer team for their sports check-ups. That will take up the rest of my day.”

Fitz grinned evilly. “I’ll tell her.”

“NO!” everyone shouted as Hayden pointed his finger at him.

“You will stay the hell away from Winnie today. It’s bad enough that Mr. Johns will be here; I don’t need you aggravating her anymore. The woman already has her hands full organizing our days. Be nice.”

“I’m always nice.” Fitz gasped, his hand covering his heart. “Honest. I’ll be the perfect Boy Scout today.”

“You were never a Boy Scout,” I snarked, shaking my head.

Opening a folder, Quinton spoke, “I’ve got Mrs. Pataki coming in for a breast augmentation consult. This will be her third one, and I’ve got Mr. Valero coming in for another wound debridement.”

“What did he do this time?” Hayden asked, shaking his head.

“Old man refuses to let his son handle Spartacus. The damn horse bit his ass, and it’s not healing right. Might need you to step in and give him the old-man-to-old-man talk, Hayden. He listens only to you anyway.”

Hayden flipped Quinton the one-finger bird, nodding as he added that to his calendar. “Rounding out my day, I will be at the University Hospital for my rotation on the burn unit, so if you guys need me, just page me.”

“I’ve got a full schedule,” Hayden spoke next. “But, Julien, I’ll need you when Mrs. Alexander comes in. Her daughter wants her checked for dementia and Alzheimer’s. Says she’s been forgetful and foggy lately.”

“Not a problem,” Julien replied, making a note in his day planner before adding, “My morning is free, but I have the tumor resection today at two, which means Nathan will cover the rest of my patients.”

“And on that note,” Nathan added. “It’s flu season, so my schedule is full. So if any of you can jump in and help me clear out the waiting room, I’d be grateful.”

“Alright, everyone,” Hayden stated, closing his file. “You heard Nathan. All hands on deck today. I’ll get Winnie to order in lunch for us. Gabe, we will see you when you get here. Give Ladybug a hug and kiss from her uncles.”

Nodding, I closed my laptop when I heard the doorbell ring.