Challenge (Harris Brothers Book 1)

“INDIE,” PRICHARD SAYS, STOPPING ME in the hallway on my way to Patch Alley.

I do my best to suppress a heavy sigh. “Hi, Dr. Prichard.” I enunciate his name more forcefully than necessary, attempting to put extra focus on the doctor part of my address.

He grasps my elbow and guides me away from the hustle and bustle, into the darkened hallway where stretchers are stored. His touch feels like needles. “I have excellent news.”

“I was just paged for an ortho consult on a little boy,” I say, pointing to where I was heading.

“This won’t take long.” His eyes crinkle on me in that way that makes me feel squirrely. I’ve done my best to avoid him since that odd moment in the scrub room, but with Camden’s surgery coming up, there’s only so much space I can create.

“The British Medical Journal will be here on Monday for the Harris surgery. They want to interview me…and you.” He seems to bite out the last part. “They are interested in talking to you about the research you did in med school.”

My mouth drops open. The British Medical Journal is even bigger than the one that published my research before. “What do they want to know?”

“Nothing too technical. They want to do a human interest piece on how you are one of the youngest published practicing doctors operating on a top-level athlete. They want to talk about your upbringing, your research, the procedure we’re doing on the Harris patient. Everything. The hospital is very keen about this idea.”

“Wow,” I reply still feeling a bit stunned. To have a medical journal interested in me at all is a tremendous honour. But a human interest piece? About my background and Camden? Nerves erupt inside my belly over how awkward this could be for me in more ways than I can even admit.

“I thought you might be pleased.” Prichard’s brows rise and he gets a smug look in his eyes. “I have a bottle of vintage Dom we can share after the surgery to celebrate.”

Realising that his hand is still on my elbow, I force out a smile. His advances are becoming more and more obvious. It’s not against hospital policy to date a member of the staff; however, when I’m already fighting against other residents’ perception of me, attention like this will not help me get ahead.

“We’ll see.” I step away from him, but he steps back into my space—so close that I can smell his cologne.

“Indie, I hope you can see what a good team we make. Together, I can really see big things happening all around.”

I stare back at him in wonder. It’s such a jarring juxtaposition for someone so handsome to say things so obviously creepy. When he has the entire hospital flocking at his feet, I wonder why he puts so much focus on me.

“Well, Dr. Prichard, I have a patient waiting, so…”

“Of course.” He smiles and winks. I turn and haul arse out of his space, away from his scent, and retreat into my own thoughts.

“What was it you did, little man?” I ask, sitting down next to a wide-eyed little boy whose tiny form takes up only ten percent of the stretcher we’re sitting on.

His lower lip protrudes as he’s doing his very best not to cry again. “Well, I was chasing my sister…and she went downstairs real fast and I wanted to get her…and so…I didn’t.”

“The steps are wooden. There’s no carpet, or padding, or anything. He screamed so loud. I just know something is broken.”

I look over at his mother’s face and see matching wide eyes tear up as she watches her four-year-old son clutch his arm protectively to his chest. It took a solid ten minutes for me to get him to stop crying and finally talk to me.

“It hurts,” he mumbles again.

An idea comes to mind. “Hey, Limerick, do you like football?”

“Yeah, my dad says, ‘Go Gunners.’” His voice wobbles as he sniffles.

I smile. “So you’re an Arsenal fan? That’s a great team. Do you want to know something really cool?”

“What?”

“I treated a professional footballer here in this hospital not very long ago.”

“Who was it?”

“He’s a striker. He’s very big and very strong and has scored lots of goals this season. But do you know what else?”

He looks at me with wide, puppy-dog eyes.

“He was scared, too.”

“He was?” A light turns on in his eyes.

“He was. And do you know how I got him to not be scared?”

“How?”

“I had him sing a song,” I lie. I can’t very well tell him that I snogged his face off. “Do you like singing?”

“Depends on the song.”

“Humpty Dumpty seems to make sense here.”

He grins and says, “I know that one.”

“Come on then, let’s hear it!”

I get him going on the nursery song before he lets me touch his arm. Eventually, around some giggles and some pitchy notes on my part, I’m able to do a full manual exam.

“Limerick,” I whisper and he stops singing. “You’re a better singer than that footballer.”

He beams and then drops his face to serious. “But he’s probably a better footballer.”

“Only until you get bigger.” I ruffle his hair and tell his mother that someone will be by to take him to X-ray. I suspect he does have a hairline fracture but, depending on the location, he could get by with a brace and not a full cast. She seems grateful, and I make a mental note to relay the singing bit to the radiologist.

“You know, that’s the third time you’ve brought him up in random conversation since we came back to work yesterday.” Belle pushes herself off the nurse’s station counter and jogs to catch up to me as I make my way to the on-call room.

“It is not,” I defend. “And don’t you have better things to do than watch me with a patient?”

Ignoring my last remark, she continues, “Yesterday you yelled at Stanley when he said footballers are all poofs who like to put on a show. And last night you ripped my head off when I asked you why you were reading a sports medicine textbook.”

“I just had to look something up,” I argue, still annoyed by my newly found interest. Ever since I saw Tower Park and felt the grandness of it all, my brain won’t shut up.

Thinking about Tower Park evokes a most unwelcome memory of how Camden held me on the dance floor as I cried the other night. How embarrassing and humiliating. For some odd reason, it’s always been easy to open up to him. I reveal things to him that I’ve never even told Belle.

The rest of my time off was very un-Tequila Sunrisey. Belle kept pestering me about why I was emotional when we left Old George that night. I lied and told her I was allergic to the ivy on the walls and had accidently touched some. She made me take medicine and spent the night with me to make sure I didn’t go into anaphylactic shock.

I’m grateful to be back at the hospital now, letting work consume my mind instead of thoughts of Camden.

His surgery is in just a few days and I have to stop thinking about him. I can’t think about how he felt when he held me at Old George, or how incredible my first time with him was, or how funny and charming he is when he puns. I don’t give a toss if he meant what he said that morning I threw him out of my flat. It was a mistake when I cried in his arms at Old George—a lapse in judgment. I’d had too much to drink and didn’t know what I was doing.

So I detached. I pushed him away not once, but twice. In my experience, that’s how most relationships are. Distant. Here one minute, gone the next. No goodbye hug. No thoughtful words. No grand gestures. Just a departure. That is what Camden Harris would have turned into if I gave too much of myself. If I allowed myself to depend on him for my sole happiness, he’d become like all the other absentee figures in my life.

I just wish I knew why this is all still bothering me so much.

“And those two instances don’t necessarily have to do with him,” I say to Belle as we reach the on-call room door. I turn, pressing my back against the door, and add, “I’m just applying the knowledge I gained from that experience to the real world.”

Her eyes narrow. “Please.” Reaching behind me, she quickly shoves open the door and sends me flying backwards.

Thankfully, a pair of able hands catch me. “Indie, are you okay?” Stanley’s big brown eyes look down on me all soft and worried and still a bit wounded. He hasn’t lost that look since that night at the club over a month ago.

“I’m fine, Stanley. Cheers.” I right myself and pull out of his arms, staring down at the floor. I feel his eyes on me as he shuffles his way out. I exhale as the door closes behind him. “Gosh, this place can feel so stifling sometimes.” I drop down onto the bed and Belle flops down next to me.

“I don’t know what you’re moaning about. You have Penis Number Two right there, ready and waiting for you. That’s called easy-peasy convenience if you ask me.”

The idea of having sex with Stanley churns my stomach. “I’m not having sex with Stanley.”

“Why not? You’ve completed number one…You were so keen on number two just a few days ago.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You said you were ready. I think experiencing a guy like Stanley could be good—”

“Maybe we can wait until I get the feel of the first cock out of me, all right? Not all of us are like you and can hop from one dick to the next without a care in the world.” My breaths come out fast and heavy as my words slice into Belle’s unsuspecting guts. I wince at her crestfallen face.

She rears back from my attempted embrace. “Fuck. Off. Indie.” Then she stands up and storms out of the room, leaving me completely shattered in her wake.

I could laugh…if I didn’t think it might make me cry. If space is what I wanted, then I’ve certainly achieved it now. First Camden, now Belle. My eyes sting with unshed tears. Tears that I refuse to release. Tears that I won’t permit to drop. Tears that have no business coming from me. This is all ridiculous.

Pushing Camden away was the right thing to do. The presence of The British Medical Journal cements that fact. I couldn’t operate on him if we were still together. Plus, what we’re doing with sports medicine is so much bigger than some crush. Walking away from Camden was necessary. He is my patient. Nothing more. I’m making history here, and all of this will work out just fine.

“Erm…Indie?” Stanley interrupts my thoughts, peeking his head around the door. “There’s someone here to see you. I put her in the consult room down Hallway D.”

“Who is it?” I ask.

“She didn’t want to say.”

She? I think to myself, standing up and smoothing my scrubs into place. Who on earth?

I make my way to the room where we take patient’s families to tell them bad news. It’s not a good room. It’s a very bad room with mauve cushioned chairs and dusty silk flowers. I hate the room.

When I open the door, my eyes fall on the back of a slender blonde who’s looking out the window on the far wall. When she turns around, my heart sinks.

“Vi,” I say, my eyes wide with frozen shock. “What are you doing here?”

Her lips are curled, nostrils flared, and eyes razor sharp, focused on me. “What did you do?” she asks, her voice low and controlled.

I frown as she advances toward me. She looks as if she wants to hit me. “Is everything okay?”

“No, Dr. Porter, it’s not. Tell me what you did. What else did you say to him?”

My face is the picture of horrified. Did Camden really tell her everything about us? I begin stammering, “I don’t…I just…We couldn’t—”

“Why would you convince him not to have the surgery? You’re his doctor! This is what’s best for him. This is what’s best for the hospital. If he leaves that stupid graft in, he won’t be able to play football or anything ever again. Tell me what you said to him.”

My head spins. This is nowhere near what I thought she was accusing me of. “I never told him not to get the graft removed, Vi.”

She looks me up and down as if she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. “Did you tell him people can get by without repairing their ACL? Did you tell him not everyone has the surgery?”

My mind flashes back to our first two nights together in the hospital, and she’s completely right. I did say all of that to him. But I didn’t say it because I thought he shouldn’t do it. I said it because…because…

I care about him.

“Vi, I said some derivative of that, but I didn’t mean for him…Of course I didn’t…He’s a career athlete.” I’m tripping over my words. “He has to have the second surgery. There’s no question.”

“We’ve been trying to convince him for two days. He’s not budging!” Her clear blue eyes are wide and wild and a bit scary, if I’m being honest. “What the hell happened between you two? I never would have given you coffee had I known you would do this to him.”

“What does coffee have to do with anything?”

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, clearly not giving up that nugget of information to me…the chosen enemy. “You have no right to judge our family or how we operate. None.”

“I never said I did!”

“Yet you passed judgement on our dad. He said you questioned him the day before Cam’s surgery. God only knows what you said to Cam. And then you hooked up with him outside of the hospital just to further insert yourself into his life and mess things up. I let it go because I could see how happy he was around you. And I know he’s a charming sod. But you! I never expected you to mess things up like this. This has to be grounds for malpractice! Who do you think you are?” Her voice is so loud it rattles the light fixture.

Her anger doesn’t scare me, though. It doesn’t intimidate me. It enrages me on behalf of myself and what Camden and I are…were. I won’t let her twist what we had together into some sick sadistic game I was playing with a patient. I won’t.

“Look. I’m no one, all right,” I begin, ready to unleash everything inside of me right now. “I’m no one except the one person who maybe looks at your brother a bit more objectively. I don’t see him as a footballer athlete. I see him as a man. A patient at first…but then, a man. A lovely, kind man who has more going on for him than football.”

“Football is his whole life—”

“I’m not finished!” I nearly growl.

She closes her mouth.

“Everything I said to him was because he was alone and hurting. You guys are around him all the time, yet you don’t see him. You don’t see the fear he has. You don’t see the look in his eyes when I talk about inserting a scope into his leg. You don’t see that maybe the fact that your mum had two surgeries and still died in the end could be causing him some turmoil. You don’t see that a meeting with Arsenal at the hospital puts pressure on him when he’s already crumbling inside, because in his mind, he is broken! Vi, he’s been a footballer most of his life. He identifies himself with it. He thinks that’s all that he is. This kind of injury messes with more than just his knee.”

Silence stretches out and tears well in Vi’s eyes as she shakes her head back and forth. She attempts to speak but stops herself, covering her mouth to hide her emotions.

“But you’re not completely wrong here,” I say with a tender touch to her shoulder. “I have been completely unprofessional and could probably lose my job after all of this. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to turn me in. I deserve it. I deserve worse.”

She looks down and swipes haphazardly at her wet cheeks.

“But please don’t turn me in because you think I was trying to manipulate your brother. I wasn’t. I cared about Camden. I still…care.” The words ache in my throat like a tight knot that refuses to turn into a full-blown cry. “But he got confused about what we were. It’s probably my fault. I should have put a stop to it before it was too late.”

Vi moves toward me with a pleading look in her eyes. “Maybe you can get through to him? Make him see sense? I don’t know what happened between the two of you. He won’t say a thing and it’s killing me to not know.”

My chin wobbles at his loyalty. Despite me hitting him, despite me rejecting him twice, despite me having sex with him and then kicking him out, he’s protecting me. He could be bad-mouthing me all over London or cost me my job and I would deserve it. But he’s not. “I can’t tell you what happened between us. Just that I wish I were wired differently. Maybe if I was more like your family, things wouldn’t have gotten so complicated between us. I really do still care, though.”

Vi’s eyes are on mine and she gives me a small, imperceptible nod. “I didn’t see Cam.” Her voice cracks. “You’re right. I didn’t see.” She sniffles and wipes her nose with a huff of disappointment. “He’s my baby brother,” her shoulders lift. “I just want what’s best for him. Our family is unique, but you have to know it comes from a good place. Maybe we made some mistakes, but football isn’t just a game to us. It’s not our way of life. It’s what brought us back to life.”

“I actually know that,” I say with a heavy exhale and nod encouragingly. “Despite everything I said, Vi, I know that Camden loves football. I think he’s trying to convince himself that he doesn’t, but I saw his face at Tower Park that day. I know what it means for him to play with his brothers. To have you in the stands…or holding his hand before surgery. I respect your family so much. I envy what you guys have. It’s completely foreign to me, but to have that level of love and devotion in your everyday lives,” I huff out incredulously. “Your baby is going to be so lucky.”

A surprised smile spreads across her face as she touches her stomach. “It means a lot to hear that.” Tears well in her eyes again. “We don’t know any other way to be a family, you know?”

“Nor do I,” I reply quietly, feeling the sting of realisation overwhelm me.

She swallows and nods definitively. “I should be going. I’m sorry I came here and melted down like this. My Momma-Bear Ninja is strong.”

I smile, but her words don’t bring me comfort. They bring me jealousy. Acute, heavy, surprising jealousy.

She makes her way to the door and calls back, “Take care, Indie.”

“You, too, Vi,” I croak and turn my back to her so she can’t see my face crumple over the realisation that overcomes me in that moment.