My Billionaire Husband Chose His Mother (Billionaire Choices. Costly Mistakes. #1)

Chapter One

Casey

THE MAN ON MY TABLE has a piece of windshield in his thigh and keeps trying to tell me it’s fine.

“It isn’t fine.” I get a fresh four-by-four onto the wound and lean my weight into it. “You have a laceration to the femoral region and you’re going to hold still while I look at it, because the alternative involves a great deal more blood than either of us wants on the floor tonight.”

He holds still. They usually do once you mention the blood.

His name is Dwayne, he’s forty-four, and he came off his motorcycle on the ramp to I-40 in a light rain because a Camry decided the turn signal was optional.

He’s lucky in the way motorcycle patients are sometimes lucky, which is to say he’s alive and complaining, and complaining is the good kind of noise.

The quiet ones are the ones that keep me awake after my shift.

“Marnie, I need a second set of hands on the pressure here.”

Marnie crosses the bay with the unhurried speed that took her nine years to learn.

She’s an ICU nurse slumming in the ED tonight because we’re short, she owed the charge nurse a favor, and she’s better at this than most of the trauma regulars, though I’d never tell her so where she could hear it and get ideas.

“Camry?”

I nod, and she takes over the pressure without another word. There’s always a careless driver regardless of the model they drive.

We get the bleeding controlled, the ortho resident paged, and Dwayne routed toward imaging with a promise that no, we aren’t going to amputate anything, and yes, he can keep the boot.

By the time they wheel him out, my scrubs have picked up a Rorschach test I don’t want to examine.

The clock over the med station reads 9:52 p.m. I have exactly enough time to consider whether I could get to the break room and eat a granola bar before the universe decides I’ve had too nice a night.

The universe decides.

The radio crackles. Rollover on I-77, single vehicle, one occupant, extrication complete, GCS fourteen, ETA four minutes. Marnie and I look at each other across the bay, bracing for the next patient.

I strip my gloves, snap on a fresh pair, and I’m already moving toward Bay Two when the doors bang open.

The paramedic hands me the story in the shorthand we all speak. “Male, thirties, restrained driver, rollover on the interstate. Roof took the worst of it. Positive LOC at scene, awake now, complaining of chest and left arm pain. Vitals are holding. He’s a talker.”

He’s a talker. His voice reaches me before the gurney does, mid-sentence and mid-argument, informing the paramedic that he doesn’t need to be here and that someone named Martin Yoon should have been called twenty minutes ago.

I step into his line of sight so he has to deal with me instead of the ceiling. “I’m Casey. I’m your nurse, and I need you to stop talking to the light fixtures and start talking to me.”

He stops. Gray eyes, sharp even through the adrenaline. Dark hair matted at the temple where something hit him. A jaw that belongs on a man used to having his face believed. For a second, he studies me and recalculates. Then he starts talking again anyway.

“I need my phone. It was in the center console, or the driver’s door, or whatever’s left of the driver’s door. There’s a call I have to make in the next hour and it can’t happen without that phone.”

“Your phone is in a bag with the rest of your belongings, and it isn’t going anywhere, which is more than I can say for you right now.” I check the collar the medic placed, and it’s good work. “You flipped a car on the interstate. The call can wait. Your neck is the thing I care about right now.”

“My neck is fine.”

“You don’t know that, and neither do I, which is exactly why you’re going to lie there and let me find out.

” I lean in until he has no choice but to hold my gaze.

“If you move your neck again before I clear it, I’m putting the hard collar back on and adjusting it until you have opinions about it. Do we understand each other?”

His expression changes, and it isn’t agreement. It’s closer to recognition, as though he’s found a wall where he expected a door.

“We understand each other.”

I get to work.

He’s a mess in the ways that photograph well and heal cleanly, which is the best sort of mess to be.

A laceration runs along his left forearm where something in the cabin opened him up, deep but tidy, the edges clean.

He guards his left side, and when I get his shirt clear, the bruising has already bloomed purple over the ribs, the seatbelt’s signature written across his chest.

He catches his breath when I palpate, which tells me at least two of those ribs are cracked, maybe three. His pupils are equal and reactive. A knot is rising at his hairline where his head found something on the way around.

There’s a watch on the wrist I’m not touching, the sort that pays a mortgage and gets photographed for the insurance rider.

I register it but leave it alone because the watch isn’t my problem tonight.

His ribs are. Money teaches a certain type of person that the world is a service and pain is a scheduling error.

I’ve met enough of those to handle this one exactly as I handle Dwayne with the windshield in his thigh, which is to say honestly and without flinching.

This one doesn’t ask me to care. He’s tracking everything instead.

When the monitor chirps he asks what the number means, and when I tell him it’s his oxygen saturation he repeats it back correct on the first try.

He reads the name off my badge, then the resident’s, then the tech’s, and files all three without being told he’ll need them.

Most people in a trauma bay retreat somewhere private and wait for it to be over.

He reads the room as though understanding it might get him out sooner.

“You’re going to CT.” I tape down the temporary dressing on his arm. “Head, cervical, chest, and abdomen, because you rolled a vehicle and I don’t guess about things a scanner can tell me. After that, we clean up the arm.”

“How long?”

“Long enough that you should make peace with missing the phone call.” I get the IV started, and he doesn’t so much as flinch at the stick, which either means he’s tougher than he looks or the adrenaline hasn’t finished with him yet.

“You want to tell me your name, or should I keep calling you sir? I can keep calling you sir. It’s honestly a little fun. ”

He almost smiles. “Sterling.”

I write it on the board. “First or last?”

“First. Hollingsford is the last, and if you say it near anyone with a press badge, I’ll know it was you.”

“I don’t know anyone with a press badge. I know a lot of people with sucking chest wounds. Different crowd.” I flag the tech and get him rolling toward imaging. “Behave in the tube. It’s a machine, not a negotiation. It won’t give you a better deal if you argue with it.”

He goes to CT. I move on, because the night doesn’t wait, and the next one is a teenager who put a kitchen knife through her palm doing something to an avocado that God didn’t intend.

Her mother apologizes to me four times while I close it, as though the avocado were somehow my inconvenience, and I tell her the truth, which is that I’ve seen worse from smarter people and her daughter is going to have a great story.

After the teenager comes a man with chest pain that turns out to be a panic attack, though you never assume it’s a panic attack until the troponins say so, since the one time you assume is the time the man dies in your ED and you carry it the rest of your career.

I don’t assume. I run the labs, which come back boring, the best results, so I send him home with a referral and a kinder word than he clearly expected.

By the time Sterling comes back from CT with a clean scan and a clearance to lose the collar, it’s past eleven, and I’ve mostly stopped thinking about him.

He’s sitting up when I come in to close the arm, and he registers me the second I clear the curtain, the same attention he gave the monitor and the badges. Not waiting for me, exactly. Keeping count of who comes and goes.

I lay out my kit. “Scan’s clean. No bleed, no fracture in the neck. You’ve got cracked ribs, which are going to make you hate laughing and sneezing for about six weeks, and this arm, which I’m going to close now. You’ll live. You’ll be insufferable about it, but you’ll live.”

“I was rude to you.”

That’s not the sentence I expected. I pause with the saline syringe over his arm.

People in trauma bays apologize for a lot of things, mostly for bleeding on you or for the noises they can’t help making, but they don’t usually circle back to their manners two hours later as though the apology requires minutes and a formal vote.

“You were.” I flush the wound and start setting up the field.

“Most people are on a backboard. You’d be amazed what comes out of a person when you strap them down and tell them they can’t move.

It doesn’t go in your chart, and it definitely doesn’t go in my performance review, so don’t lose sleep over it.

You’ve got enough going on with the ribs. ”

“I don’t apologize often.”

“I believe you.” I get the lidocaine in and warn him about the sting. He follows the whole thing with that same unhurried attention, and this close his eyes are gray. Under the mess he’s good-looking, aware of it, and used to it working for him. “Hold still. This part’s fussy.”

He holds still. I work the edges clean and start to close. He lets me, and for a few minutes, the only conversation is me telling him what I’m doing before I do it, which is a habit I’ve never broken and never want to.

When I’m nearly done, he considers the row of sutures with the same attention he gave the monitor. “You make people do what you want without raising your voice. I watched them try to argue with you tonight, and they all lost. Me included.”

He says it without flattery or the social lubrication most people use when they compliment a stranger.

He says it as an observation, the way you’d note that a bridge was well-engineered.

I note that. Most patients don’t notice what I do.

They notice how they feel about what I do.

Sterling Hollingsford detected the mechanism.

“It’s a transferable skill. Mostly I use it on grown men who think they can walk off a rollover.

” I tie off the last suture and start the dressing.

“You’re closed. Ortho will want to see you about the ribs.

Someone will be by with discharge instructions and a prescription you should actually fill instead of toughing out, because rib pain makes people breathe shallowly.

Shallow breathing gives you pneumonia, and pneumonia is a stupid way for a healthy man to die. ”

He actually smiles. “You’re very calm about telling me I could die.”

“You’re not going to die. You’re going to be sore and impossible for six weeks.

I only mention the pneumonia because men who look like you tend to skip the prescription.

” I peel off my gloves and step back. “Take care of yourself, Sterling. Try not to flip any more cars. The next nurse might not be as patient about it.”

I leave him there before he can form another sentence. I have four other patients and a granola bar with my name on it, and I don’t linger with the ones who look at me like a problem worth solving. Nothing good has ever come to me from a man who studies a room until he owns it.

Marnie catches me at the med station, where I’m finally, gloriously, unwrapping the granola bar like it’s a Michelin course.

She leans a hip against the counter. “Okay. Who’s the suit in four-twelve?”

“There’s no suit. There’s a guy with cracked ribs and a forearm lac. Rollover on 77.”

She gives me the look she reserves for residents who round without reading the chart.

“There’s a man in four-twelve who just asked the unit clerk, very politely, whether the redheaded nurse who fixed his arm is working tomorrow night.

He tipped her a compliment so smoothly she came back here to tell me about it, and she’s married. ”

I stop with the granola bar halfway to my mouth.

“He has a name too,” Marnie goes on. “I asked, and he answered me like he was granting a favor, which tells you everything. Do you want to know it, or do you want to keep pretending you don’t already have it written on your board in your own handwriting?”

“I write down all my patients. That’s charting. They give us a whole class on it.”

“He asked about you by hair color, not room number.” She’s enjoying this far too much for a woman who came down here as a favor.

“In three years, I’ve never seen you come off a shift and not inhale that granola bar in four bites.

You’ve been holding it since I walked over.

I’m not saying anything. I’m just making an observation. ”

On the board I wrote his first name and left the last one off, because Hollingsford is the name he told me to keep quiet, and he’d know it was me. “I have no idea who he is.” I finish the granola bar in two bites to prove it.

Then I catch myself heading toward the four-hundred hall to check on a patient who’s stable and none of my business. I stop in the middle of the corridor. That bothers me more than anything the man in four-twelve has said all night.