Bachelor Doctor

“Honest,” she added quickly.

Trey nodded his head and went on operating.

While others withered around him, Trey Weldon just kept on going.

“To watch Trey Weldon operate on a brain is to experience a virtuoso at the top of his game,” Jimmy Dimarino, a first-year general surgery resident—and on some days an aspiring neurosurgeon himself—often enthused to Callie.

Jimmy tried to attend as many of Dr. Weldon’s operations as he could, badgering Callie for scheduling information. As the chief scrub nurse on Trey Weldon’s handpicked OR team for the past twelve months, Callie knew what procedure was slated and when; she was also privy to the emergency schedule.

She shared the inside scoop with Jimmy because they went way back, to the bad old days of elementary school when they’d lived next door to each other. Somehow their relationship had survived a brief eighth-grade romance, too. These days, Jimmy’s long-term fondness for Callie had been elevated to outright admiration—due in large part to her access to Dr. Trey Weldon.

“The AVM has been repaired,” Trey announced. “We were able to avoid any undue disturbance of the surrounding brain tissue, so the patient’s recovery ought to be swift and unremarkable.”

He made it sound like a decree that would naturally be obeyed. Callie smiled behind her surgical mask, then lifted her eyes to see Trey looking directly at her.

For one seemingly endless moment, time stood still as their gazes met and held.

And then: “Fritche, close,” Trey ordered with a nod toward one of the residents. He moved away from the table amidst murmurs of praise and appreciation, even a smattering of applause.

Scott Fritche, a first-year neurosurgical resident, stepped up to close, a task often given to underlings to further their experience.

Callie stayed where she was, assisting Scott Fritche, handing him the necessary instruments, sponges and sutures, subtly guiding him, before he needed to ask for anything.

She’d worked with Fritche a few times before, during his general-surgery residency, preceding this one, before she had become a permanent member of Trey’s team. But she didn’t remember Fritche being quite as ham-handed as he was today.

“I swear it took Fritche longer to close than for Trey to perform the entire operation,” complained Quiana Turner, as she and Callie trooped out of the OR, tugging off their masks.

Callie smiled at Quiana’s exaggeration. “We’ve gotten spoiled, working with Trey,” she conceded. “He’s a tough act for anybody to follow, let alone a resident.”

“Fritche sure isn’t the hotshot he thinks he is,” Leo Arkis said, sneering.

Leo did the advance OR work for the Weldon team and also served as backup relief to Callie or Quiana when necessary. “Could that clod have done any worse in there, messing up sutures and dropping sponges like a flower girl tossing rose petals at a wedding?”

“That’s kind of harsh, Leo. Fritche wasn’t all that bad,” chided Callie. “He’s inexperienced and he was nervous but—”

“I wish we’d called Trey back in to watch that jerk at work,” Leo cut in. “It would’ve been a kick seeing the icy wrath of our boss freeze Fritche into a human Popsicle.”

Callie arched her dark brows. “Leo, I know how you feel about Fritche, but ratting on him to Trey is—”

She broke off in midsentence because Dr. Trey Weldon stood in the middle of the newly renovated lounge, which the trio had just entered.

He was pulling his scrub shirt over his head.

The sight of him stopped Callie in her tracks, rendering her speechless. Trey tossed the shirt aside and stood bare-chested, the strong, well-defined muscles of his chest and shoulders revealed in the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights. His green scrub pants rode low on his waist, displaying the flat belly, a deep-set navel and a sprinkling of dark, wiry hair arrowing downward.

In the year that she’d been working on his team, Callie had seen Trey Weldon in scrubs too many times to count. But she hadn’t seen what lay beneath them. Until this moment.

Her mouth was suddenly quite dry.

“God bless this new unisex lounge,” murmured Quiana, staring appreciatively at Trey. “Next, I hope they combine the locker rooms.”

“Ratting on who?” Trey asked, his eyes on Callie. “What are you talking about, Sheely?”

It seemed that he had overheard at least part of what she’d said.

Callie’s dark eyes widened, and she forced herself to concentrate. She knew Trey wouldn’t like what they’d been talking about, and she wasn’t eager to be the one to tell him about Fritche’s less-than-stellar-performance. Errors, in general, annoyed Trey, but an error in his operating room…yikes!

Trey Weldon didn’t make mistakes in the operating room, had not even come close to one during the entire year that Callie had been working with him. No, this wasn’t a conversation she cared to continue with him.

“Ever hear the old saying of All’s Well That Ends Well?” she asked hopefully. “Let’s just say it applies in this case.”

It was an optimistic approach, she knew. Trey had no patience with those who wasted his time by not supplying him with the answers he wanted. He was looking impatient now. Impatient—and shirtless and muscular.

“Sheely,” Trey was already verging on testy. He directed a blue-eyed laser stare at her. “Stop talking in riddles.”

Callie flicked the tip of her tongue nervously over her top lip. Why did he have to grill her while standing there, half-nude? The sight was wreaking havoc with her thought processes. “Well, uh—”

“I don’t know if you’d call this ratting, Trey,” Leo spoke up. “But Fritche screwed up in there today. I thought you ought to know,” he added righteously.

Trey’s face went dark as a sky before a tornado was about to strike. “Is my patient—”

“He’s fine,” Callie said quickly. “Fritche made a few mistakes, correctable ones. The patient is fine,” she affirmed. “We would’ve called you the second anything turned bad.”

“That’s not good enough,” Trey snapped. “I expect to be called the second before anything turns bad.”

“Luckily it didn’t even get that far because Sheely was right there before No-Opposable-Thumbs Fritche could do any damage,” Leo hastened to assure him. “Honest, there was no harm done, Trey.”

“Okay, then.” Trey gave Leo a fraternal slap on the shoulder. “I can always count on you to be frank and up-front with me, can’t I, Leo?” His slight smile instantly faded when he turned back to Callie. “What about you, Sheely?” Trey’s expression darkened further. “I want a word with you, Sheely. Now.”

His big hand cupped her elbow, and he walked her a few feet away, turning her aside, his six-foot frame blocking her view of the other two.

His hand stayed on her elbow, and Callie tried hard not to notice. Trey frequently touched her, placing his hand on the small of her back or on her shoulder when she preceded him through doors, curling his fingers around her wrist while enthusiastically describing something neurosurgical, cupping her elbow to guide her wherever.

She pretended to pay no attention to his touch because she knew Trey himself was oblivious to it, as oblivious as he was to her as an individual. As a woman. His touch was automatic and unaware, definitely nothing personal. He would clasp her wrist as one might grip a pencil, she knew that his hand on her back or her elbow was akin to him resting his palm on a railing.

There were times when she wished she actually were the inanimate object Trey Weldon considered her to be. It would be so much easier—on her nerves, on her senses. The warm strength of his fingers on her skin evoked sensations that were hopelessly, girlishly romantic. And embarrassing because it was all so futile.

Sometimes, alone in bed in the darkness of her room at night, Callie pondered the irony of the situation. That she—who had always been so sensible and practical, who’d never suffered any hopeless, girlish, embarrassing yearnings, not even as an adolescent, when almost everybody else did—would be struck with this acute crush at the mature age of twenty-six.

The situation appalled her. She had a crush on her boss! Worse, she was a nurse with a crush on a doctor. Might as well throw in their class differences too; the proletarian yearning for the lord of the manor. A triple cliché, and she was living it. What unparalleled humiliation! Especially since her crush was entirely unrequited.

Callie refused to kid herself, to even pretend that Trey gave her a thought outside the operating room. Of course he didn’t. And though she continually fought her feelings for him, his touch and his penetrating stare affected her viscerally.

There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about that, but she could keep it her most-closely guarded secret. Which she had, quite successfully.

No one, especially not Trey, ever had to know about the sweet, syrupy warmth that flowed through her at his slightest touch. Nor would she ever reveal the sharp ache that sometimes threatened to bring her to her knees when his deep-blue eyes looked into hers.

Except right now those blue eyes of his were hard and cold with anger. If any stare could freeze a hapless recipient into a human Popsicle, it would be the one Trey was directing at her at this moment.