Chapter 4
My presentation went off without a hitch. I felt silly for worrying over it now but that was my style: obsess and fret, and then realize I had it under control from the start. Or did I? Was obsessing and fretting integral to my success?
It was a question I’d never answer.
Though I did deserve some added credit for pulling it all off with Jay Acosta watching from the back row, his head tipped a few degrees to the side as if he didn’t quite trust what I was saying.
That was probably the root of it. He could play at being helpful and collegial all he wanted, but at the end of the day, he didn’t have much respect for me. I didn’t know why I still let it bother me. After all these years, I should’ve let it go.
I didn’t. As the day wore on and one session melted into another, and then into a cocktail party sponsored by pharma reps, I found myself gnawing on the offenses of Jay Acosta.
I couldn’t understand what this man had against me.
Even if I excused him barring me from his practice—and I wasn’t sure I could—he had no right to sniff his way through my presentation as if he was just waiting for a reason to report me to the conference committee.
After several glasses of below-average wine and more networking than I usually conducted in a year, I made my way to the front desk. I had high hopes for finding my luggage—and a suite I didn’t have to share with my professional nemesis.
I found neither but worse than that, I discovered that Jay had explicitly instructed the hotel staff to refuse all payment from me. I couldn’t even cover the cost of the clothes he’d conjured up for this morning’s breakfast.
It was enough to send me stomping down the gently lit path toward his villa, not at all seduced by the warm, tropical air or the round notes of the steel-drum band back at the cocktail party.
I didn’t care if I had to sleep on the beach tonight, I was getting away from this man as fast as my legs could carry me.
I let myself into the villa, determined to gather the few things and put some well-needed distance between myself and that man. Except that man was here. He’d been…waiting for me?
Oh god. Oh god. He was going to critique my presentation. He’d been sitting here, counting down the minutes until I returned and he could dismantle my talk to my face.
There was nothing in the world that could justify this kind of—this blackballing.
I’d done nothing to him. Our paths had barely crossed during my training with Sowelby.
I didn’t steal his favorite surgical techs away from him or needlessly hold up his ORs.
The only times I even thought about him were when I examined the lack of trust I had in my colleagues and how I’d learned that lesson from him.
As the door slammed shut behind me and Jay pushed to his feet, saying, “It’s the woman of the hour!”
I stared at him for a long beat. I couldn’t think. Stupid cheap wine. There was a reason I didn’t usually drink. The last thing I needed was to stand here, gazing at him open-mouthed like a guppy. I couldn’t even— Wait. Why were there candles everywhere? And two bottles of champagne on ice?
“What the hell is going on here?” I yelled. I might’ve stomped a foot too. I blamed the wine.
He held out a hand and though I couldn’t imagine why, it seemed like he expected me to go to him. To take his hand. I dug a fingernail into the pad of my thumb just to make sure I was awake and not lost in a strange, wine-drenched dream. Yep, fully conscious. Also, never drinking again.
I shook my head and stayed put. His brows pinched as if this disappointed him but eventually, he said, “We’re celebrating, Elizabeth.”
What in the world was happening here? “Celebrating what?”
He dropped the hand and cut a glance to the side. The living room was dim with only the candlelight and I couldn’t read his expression. I heard an exhale, maybe a laugh—of course he’d laugh at me—and then, “Your talk. It was outstanding.”
What a sadistic way to start this feedback conversation. All the more reason for me to promptly excuse myself from this situation. “Oh, was it, now?”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Do you not agree?”
“I really don’t require a debrief. If you’re determined to provide me with notes, you can email them.”
“I don’t have notes for you.” He had the audacity to laugh again. “I thought your talk was exceptional. The best I heard all day, and there were many good ones. This is quite the accomplishment for you though…though I can’t tell if you see it the same way.”
“I-I…it was fine. Okay? Is that what you want me to say? It was great, I didn’t screw up, and many thanks to you, I didn’t have to present in a bathrobe. So, my gratitude for that. Is that what you want to hear? Some recognition that you saved the day for me?”
“Have I offended you, Elizabeth?”
I felt like the tide was coming in around me. The ground that’d once been solid and stable was now soft, wet sand and I was sinking into it. “Could you stop calling me that?”
“Calling you…what?” He peered at me. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes,” I snapped.
“Why? It’s your name.”
“Everyone calls me Beth,” I said. “Or Dr. Spivey, and for us, right now, I think that’s where we need to stay.”
“You’d like me to call you Dr. Spivey,” he said slowly.
“Yes, I would.”
He strolled toward the champagne. That bucket was probably real silver. Stupid, expensive silver bucket. He grabbed a bottle by the neck and loosened the wire cage around the head. “Not until you tell me what I’ve done to upset you.”
“What—what you’ve done?” I nearly choked in the process of spitting those words back at him. “Let’s start with how you ruined my life.”
His gaze locked with mine as he worked the cork. “You’ll have to explain that to me, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, will I? I’ll have to explain how you told Sowelby you’d burn your practice down before you let him hire me?”
The cork popped as he said, “That’s not what happened, my darling girl. Not even close.”
“That’s exactly what happened.” I was dangerously close to shrieking here and I didn’t want to shriek.
Not in front of this man and not while he opened a bottle of champagne like—like that.
And not with him calling me his darling girl.
That was completely unacceptable. The roll and swoop in my belly confirmed it.
“I heard you say it, Acosta. I was outside the door.”
“Eavesdropping, were we?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I had a verbal offer from Sowelby—”
“Which he wasn’t empowered to extend,” Acosta said under his breath.
“—but the contract never came. All these other offers were passing me by. I went there to talk to him, to find out what was going on, and that’s when I heard you say what you definitely said.”
“Hmm.” He filled one glass, then another. Took his damn time doing it too. “It’s too bad you didn’t hear the rest of the conversation.”
“Yeah, well, I had my hands full salvaging my career. You’ll forgive me for not sticking around.”
Acosta crossed the room toward me, a champagne glass in each hand.
He held one out to me but I gave it a petulant stare.
This did not deter him. He waited, wagging the glass and grinning at me as if I wasn’t on the verge of storming out of here for good.
After another moment, it became obvious he wasn’t about to quit so I took the glass and gave him a hard, acidic glare in return.
He tapped the bottom of my glass, silently ordering me to drink up. I took a sip but only to move this conversation along. I was never drinking again—after this.
“If you had waited another minute or two,” he started, “you would’ve heard me say I’d leave the practice if he had a problem with me marrying you.”
That was how I ended up spraying him in champagne.
“Excuse me,” I cried, “but what the hell did you just say?”
He wiped a hand down his shirt, a smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. “I told him I was going to marry you.”
I realized then that Acosta had dropped a hand to the small of my back. I didn’t hate it though I was frantically trying to find a physiological reason for that anomaly. “You told Sowelby you’d burn the practice to the ground.”
“If he had a problem with it.”
He dragged his hand up to my shoulders. His fingers slipped under my hair and stroked the back of my neck.
I had to fight to keep myself from melting.
My entire body begged to sag into him, to let my eyes close and my lips part with a little moan.
Mercifully, I was stronger than all that. “But I didn’t get the job.”
“Because Sowelby dragged his feet on the offer,” Acosta said, his thumb pressing into the knots at the base of my neck. “He does that. It’s terribly annoying. We put an assistant on him full-time just to manage these stray issues.”
I made a show of trying to shake him off but there was no real energy behind it and he didn’t go far.
If anything, it gave him an opening to slip his fingers under the neck of my dress and massage the stress boulders I’d built up there.
I’d never admit it aloud—never—but no one had ever rubbed me like this.
Not with this single minded focus on chasing away the things that troubled me.
“That’s it?” I managed, a little too breathy to be taken seriously. “I’m…stranded in this dungeon of a practice because I’m one of Sowelby’s stray issues?”
“He didn’t expect you to take another offer.”
I shifted to catch his gaze as I downed the rest of my champagne. Grabbed his glass; drained that too. “I didn’t have a choice at that point.”
Acosta nodded as if he understood about the utter shit I’d been stuck in. He kept working on my neck and shoulders. “I’ve been trying to hire you back for years.”
“Really? Then why haven’t I seen an offer, Jay?”