Chapter 2
Chapter Two
My daughter is studying to be a surgeon. I just hope she makes the cut.
—From Bash’s dad joke collection
Bash
“Dr. Desai is still with his previous appointment. Do you want to wait for him in here?” The formidable woman assessed him as she motioned to the waiting room behind him. “Or would you prefer to meet him in our café?”
Bash leaned against the doorframe, somehow sensing that his trademark flirtatious grin would have exactly zero impact on his brother-in-law’s executive assistant.
“Amani,” he began, a quick, subtle scan of her name plate verifying the identity of the no-nonsense Cerberus stand-in—minus the extra heads and the whole doggish thing—who was currently gatekeeping Brinder’s office.
Her eyebrows shot up. “I hope it’s ok to call you by your first name.
It’s just that I feel like I know you. Brinder speaks so highly of you.
Says you are the glue who keeps him together at work. ”
There.
He saw it.
A subtle softening of her lips.
He’d become an astute judge of people over the years—something that had served him well in his film roles and his relationships with others.
Everyone ultimately wanted to be seen, to be recognized for what they did well and the value they added.
And Bash had realized early on that if you can effectively diagnose that, you can melt the iciest of reserves.
One glance at Amani’s supremely organized desk made it clear this woman took her role seriously. And so that was the way to her heart.
“The past week has been baby Judah-palooza,” he offered with a grin he didn’t have to fake about his infant nephew.
“Honor and Brinder have been on cloud nine, but I know from Brinder that having you holding down the fort so admirably has made his transition into parenthood as seamless as possible. My sister echoed that.”
He watched Amani press her lips against the smile that was forming. Yep. Everyone wanted to be authentically recognized for a job well done. That was a universal truth. Just like the Jane Austen truth about a single man in possession of a fortune wanting a wife.
Except that one was most definitely not the case with him.
No, it wasn’t a wife he wanted per se. It was the role of a lifetime—one that was currently dangling just out of reach.
And, rumor had it, he might need a wife to secure it.
Because…it was just that easy to find a wife. One he could trust and respect. Ha.
He wondered if Brinder’s clearly organized assistant had the lowdown on anyone looking for a husband. You know…just temporarily. Until he landed and filmed the part that would blast him out of the suffocating niche he’d been bound to since his mid-twenties.
Focus, Bash. A time and place for everything. Time and place.
He’d worry about his professional crisis later.
For now, he needed to escape his temporary abode.
It was generous of his sister and brother-in-law to put him up in their guest house by the pool.
It gave him much-needed time to catch up with his baby sister, spend some time with his brother-in-law, and snuggle his new nephew.
But it seemed that all their friends had small humans, too, each of whom generated a lot of loud and chaotic activity.
Especially for a confirmed bachelor accustomed to a more peaceful environment.
Well, unless he was clubbing. Or fucking. But those activities provided an entirely different atmosphere, with an entirely different group of people, and encouraged an entirely different kind of focus for his energetic brain.
Right now? His Funcle brain was depleted and his body ached from playing lawn games probably best relegated to elementary school.
He just needed a minute to think without high-pitched shrieks and laughter—as happy a sound as those were—shoving his highly distractible train of thought off the tracks.
Yep, kids were great and hilarious and ex-fucking-hausting.
And this trip reinforced a long-time personal truth—he just didn’t want any of his own.
Which had led to his most recent breakup. Well, that and the fact that his last girlfriend was vapid, twenty years younger…and not unlike a human velociraptor. She’d also cheated on him. Quite publicly. He considered himself lucky to escape that one unscathed. Well, relatively.
Bash sighed, scrubbing his hand down his face and refocusing his gaze on Brinder’s impressive sentinel.
“And now I get the joy of meeting the illustrious Amani.”
Ah, and there it was. The old interior eye roll. When you were as adept at reading people as he was, you couldn’t miss it.
“Don’t push it, Mr. Wheatley. Spare me your schmoozing, please. I know the truth of it, and you aren’t saying anything I haven’t heard from Dr. Desai himself.”
“Please. Call me Bash.”
A slow smile spread across his face as his blood hummed.
Oh, he wasn’t attracted to Amani—mostly because of the rock on her fourth finger that rendered her out of bounds.
But it didn’t prevent him from enjoying some spirited verbal sparring.
It reminded him of doing improv at his parents’ playhouse in the Cotswolds. He loved good banter.
His smile slid just a bit. His parents had jetted in for a quick visit to meet their grandson.
It was their busy rehearsal season for the playhouse, but at seventy-four and sixty-nine, his parents showed no sign of slowing down.
They ran their theater company and still took roles in various films, befitting the Hollywood royalty they were.
They also had insatiable granny-slash-grampy lust, and instead of pacifying them, Judah’s arrival was akin to waving Belgium’s finest before a chocoholic. They wanted more. And it had taken them barely ten minutes of alone time with Bash before they’d started grilling him about progeny of his own.
Thankfully, their stay had been short—a much longer visit planned for the fall—and Bash had managed to artfully change the subject whenever the topic of him settling down came up. He’d had decades of practice with that particular script.
The true breaking point, however, had hit that morning, when a group of his sister’s girlfriends had descended on the house.
He’d stepped into the kitchen for lunch, taken one look at the cackling coven, and proceeded to exit stage right smoother than silk.
Bash had texted Brinder from the car, asking if he had time to meet up for lunch, and Brinder quickly replied that he had half an hour around one.
Bash checked his watch. Twelve forty-five. Before he could lean in to Amani with some witty repartee, the door to Brinder’s office opened and…
…holy shit…
…an angel emerged, pausing in the doorway as the conversation she’d clearly been a part of continued. An angel who was clearly incensed about something, if the increased pace of her breathing and the two spots of color high on her satiny cheekbones were any indication.
“Brinder, I will not allow this kind of behavior on my team. Dr. Lynch may participate in whatever extracurricular activities she chooses. On her time.”
Her voice was like velvet over ice. Disciplined. Crisp. Stern.
Sexy
As
Fuck.
Not even acknowledging his presence, the angel continued, “However, when she is on shift and I page her, I expect her to be speedy, prompt, and ready to do whatever is needed. As it is, addressing this poor performance—for the second time I might add—is not only a personal inconvenience to me, consuming the only free minutes I had today to eat before my next round of cases, it negatively impacts her teammates and patients.”
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” his brother-in-law responded smoothly from inside the office, clearly in peacekeeper role.
It had been quite the jolt to his system to witness his little sister’s teenage crush as a grown man.
And a doctor, like Brinder’s own dad. Also, apparently, some C-suite bigwig.
He’d always liked Brinder when he’d dated Honor during high school.
Considered him part of the family, or at least the inner circle of their family-friend group.
Then his sister ghosted him and ran away to film a movie, and he hadn’t seen the guy since.
Bash knew the whole story now—the then-teenagers madly in love but also somehow recognizing that their timing was off. They’d each needed space and time to grow up. And appreciate each other. Eventually, time brought them back together, like two magnets unable to resist connecting.
He was happy to see his sister finally truly happy, but the PDA between Brinder and Honor was getting to be a bit much.
They were constantly kissing, touching each other, sharing loving glances.
It was enough to make him want to gag. Except that he recognized his own deep-seated, but unlikely, desire for something similar.
Because, of course, to thine own self be true.
Brinder’s voice carried from the office. “We’ll address consequences of this with you and our graduate medical education team this afternoon, Dr. Lynch. You must respond to pages immediately. No excuses.”
Bash heard a low murmur, which sounded like assent, coming from the office.
“Your reputation will follow you, Dr. Lynch,” his angel added, arms folded, her tone gloriously unyielding.
Christ, she was stunning. “This isn’t an easy field for a woman.
It’s a sad but true fact that there will usually be more aggressive and judging eyes on us than on our male peers.
If you want to succeed in orthopedics, or any surgical specialty for that matter, you need to be better, sharper, more careful, more dedicated than others.
The bar is high for us, Dr. Lynch.” Angel let that sit for a beat before adding icily, “Don’t undermine yourself or your female colleagues by becoming a stereotype. ”