Up All Night: The Walker Brothers, Book 3 E-Book

Amanda Adams

• Herausgeber: Tydbyts Media
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

He knows instantly that she is dangerous.
Everything about her is wrong.

He's rich.
Successful.
Worked hard to get where he is...
Alone.

Alone is safer.
The heart is a fool.
He learned that the hard way.

But she's curious.
Tenacious.
She's a reporter -- and he has secrets.
She laughs at him when he's serious,
cries when he tries to be funny.

He should avoid her at all costs.
Should.
That's a dangerous word.
A word that can break your heart.

Leseprobe

Up All Night

The Walker Brothers, Book 3

Amanda Adams

Contents

Up All Night

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Make Me Forget

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Up All Night

The Walker Brothers, Book 3

Once upon a time Mitchell Walker fell in love...and trusted the wrong woman. That one mistake nearly cost him his future and he vowed to never trust another woman.

Now he is a young, successful surgeon. Women throw themselves at his feet, and he gives them what they want, as long as they don't ask for his heart. The strategy is working well for him until he meets freelance reporter Jessica Finley.

She's smart, she makes him laugh, and she sees right through his playboy persona.

Jessica's fire may burn hot enough to keep him up all night, but will their love be strong enough to burn away the ghosts of their past and melt the ice around his heart?

Copyright 2016 Amanda Adams

Up All Night: The Walker Brothers, Book 3

Cover design Copyright 2016 by eBook Indie Covers

Literary Work, First Edition. March 2016

Copyright 2016 by Amanda Adams

Published By Tydbyts Media

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, people, places and events are completely a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Prologue

Mitchell Walker pulled up behind his brother Derek’s four-wheel drive and put his cherry-red sports car in park. Jake, his baby brother, had parked his white truck on the street, his passenger tire riding the snowplow’s leftovers like driving was part of an obstacle course. The sight made him smile. December in the Colorado high country, if you couldn’t handle driving in snow, you needed to get the fuck out.

A few feet away, Derek opened the door of his SUV, stepped out and slammed it closed behind him. He was dressed, as usual, in black, a stark contrast to Mitchell’s dress pants and sport coat. Derek’s dark hair, dark eyes and bad boy attitude had broken dozens of women’s hearts, but Derek was all bark and no bite, as far as Mitchell was concerned. Derek grew up mean, but he would die for any one of his brothers without question. End of story. Before Derek had become his brother, Mitchell’s life had revolved around some pretty fucked-up shit. Hell, they both had survived hell before their mother adopted them. How they’d ended up being the responsible mentors for their two younger brothers was beyond him.

Mitchell nodded at Derek and, as always, his brother fell in step beside him as they made their way up the driveway to the front door. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. They both knew why they were here, and it sucked.

Mrs. Klasky opened the door in a pair of navy-blue pants and an oversized, cream-colored sweater. She was pushing eighty, but had fire in her eyes and a no-nonsense way about her that Mitchell had always liked He liked to know where he stood with people. He hated playing games with anyone, young or old, in his bed or out of it.

“Come in. Come in. Jake’s already here.” She motioned them inside and Mitchell followed Derek into the hallway. When Derek looked over his shoulder at her, she smiled. “Still handsome, I see. Straight on back to the kitchen, boys. I made lemonade. And I have cookies, Derek. Your favorite.”

Derek’s cheeks turned pink and Mitchell stepped in to save his brother from embarrassment. Mrs. Klasky had always pampered Derek the most, had a sweet spot for him a mile wide. Mitchell would give him shit about it later. “Thanks, Mrs. Klasky. We can’t wait to have some of your cookies.”

Derek coughed into his hand and took the opportunity to hit Mitchell on the back of the head, hard, as they followed her past a wall filled with family photos and sepia-toned portraits of the Klasky family’s ancestors. The carpet was green shag, and the walls were lined with oak paneling that had probably been installed in the seventies. Jake was in his usual spot at the Klasky kitchen table, sitting in the hardwood oak chair closest to the twenty-year-old sofa covered with a hideous paisley print.

Mitchell hadn’t been in the house in years. Still looked the same. Felt the same. Smelled the same. Mitchell hit Jake on the back by way of greeting. His baby brother was the youngest, but the little fucker had outgrown them all by about five inches and a good fifty pounds. Put a pair of cowboy boots and a hat on the kid and he looked like a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys. Except he was too pretty for that. And too damn soft-hearted. Jake still lived on their family ranch, taking care of horses and doing his cowboy shit. He threw around hundred-pound hay bales like they were cracker boxes. And as the baby, Jake never passed up an opportunity to rub their noses in the fact that he could kick every single one of his older brothers’ asses.

The thought of horse shit and dirt made Mitchell shudder and he sat down at the table. He loved his childhood on the ranch, but he needed the noise and bustle of a city. Being out there on the ranch was too damn quiet. There was too much space and too much time to think.

Now, give him a cliff face with a 5.10 or 5.11 rating to climb and he’d breathe mountain air all damn day. He loved the challenge of hanging by his fingertips off the side of a rock almost as much as he loved the adrenaline rush of working the E.R.

But today wasn’t going to be about fun. This little gathering was about losing his mom and the complete and total wreckage that followed.

He took a deep breath as the scents of cookies, lemonade and pine-scented cleaner surrounded him.

“Here you go, boys.” Mrs. Klasky set a glass of lemonade in front of him and Derek. Mitchell took a sip. Cold. Tart. Perfect.

“Thanks.” Fresh squeezed and real sugar, just like Mom used to make.

The doorbell chimed and Mrs. Klasky excused herself. “That’ll be Chance.” Mrs. Klasky disappeared again and came back with his brother Chance, the newly blooded attorney just a year out of law school. Chance was wearing a suit and tie, which helped Mitchell not feel like the uptight doctor at the table. Chance loved the city almost as much as Mitchell did, but for different reasons. Chance was practical. He liked the convenience of living close to restaurants and his office. Mitchell didn’t give a shit about any of that crap, he simply needed the noise so he could sleep at night.

“Chance.” Derek got up from his seat at the end of the table and wrapped Chance up in a hug.

“Hey, loser.” After a quick hug, Chance patted Derek on the shoulder. Jake and Mitchell took their turns.

“Late to the party, as usual.” Jake grabbed Chance and lifted him off the floor as if his brother were a little girl. The two youngest, Jake and Chance, were close and Mitchell grinned at Jake’s antics. It was good to be together. Always good.

“And you still smell like cow patties and hay bales.” Chance chuckled but Jake wasn’t going to take the insult lying down.

“Tough love, brother. But you smell like you had your ass wiped by a bathroom attendant with a perfumed moist towelette. You turning into one of those metrosexual city boys?” Jake set Chance down and Mitchell answered for him.

“Naw, man. That would be me.” Mitchell grinned and grabbed Chance around the shoulders.

Chance stood there in his suit, and as usual, he was the only one in a tie. Even Mr. Klasky, their mother’s eighty-year-old attorney, was in khakis and a golf shirt.

“Now that you’re all here, we can begin.” Mr. Klasky rolled in a small television with the old-fashioned VCR combo. Jake kicked out a chair with his foot and Chance sat in it, tugging on his tie to loosen the noose around his neck. He’d just started working at a well-respected law firm in the city. Poor bastard worked almost as many hours as Mitchell did as a second-year surgical resident.

They all thanked Mrs. Klasky respectfully as she served them lemonade and a tray of chocolate chip cookies, just as she’d been doing since they were in grade school. She gave Derek an extra pat on the cheek as she passed him and Mitchell hid his grin behind his hand. Derek kicked him under the table.

Mrs. Klasky took the cookies back to the counter and stood, leaning against the wall. Jake offered her his seat, but she shooed him away. “You boys are going to want to be sitting down for this.”

“All due respect, Mr. Klasky, but Mother’s estate was taken care of months ago when she first got sick.” Chance spoke up, but Mitchell just leaned back in his chair and waited, his pulse kicked up a notch at her warning. What the hell was Mr. Klasky up to?

“Yes. Yes. I know.” The older man bent over, looking for an outlet in the wall so he could plug in the dinosaur of a television. They’d had an old rabbit-eared TV and VCR like that in the loft above the barn. He’d watched Jurassic Park and super-hero movies for hours on end, sipping Dr. Pepper and eating chocolate candy he’d stolen from his mother’s pantry. It was a damn miracle his teeth hadn’t rotted from his head by the time he was twelve.

“Then why are we here?” Chance’s gaze darted from Mr. Klasky, who had finally found an outlet and was shoving the electrical prongs into it, to his wife, who glowered at him with a raised eyebrow until he added, “Sir.”

Mr. Klasky stood up and rubbed his hands together like he couldn’t wait to spring a huge surprise on them. Derek shifted in his seat and thrummed his fingers on the table. Derek hated surprises.

“Well, boys, I promised your momma that I would get you all together today, six weeks to the day after she passed. God rest her soul.”

“But why? Everything’s been handled.” Chance leaned forward, in total lawyer mode.

“Not everything.” Mrs. Klasky pulled four envelopes from her apron pocket. Each looked like it would hold an oversized birthday card. She walked to the table and handed one to Mitchell and each of his brothers. “Don’t open them yet. You have to watch the video first.”

Chance’s card was green, no doubt due to his brother’s obsession with The Incredible Hulk. Jake’s was plain white. And Derek? Mr. black leather and tattoos held an envelope that was a bright, cheerful yellow.

Mitchell stared down at his card. The envelope was faded red, but his mother’s distinct handwriting was on the outside. He had no idea what was inside, but whatever it was made his chest hurt and his eyes burn. He blinked away the sensation and focused on the back of Derek’s head. Fuck. Leave it to their mother to pull this shit from beyond the grave. She always had been two or three steps ahead of her boys. Always. That was how she’d straightened them out. Their mother always knew what was going on with her sons, sometimes even before they knew themselves.

“Holy hell.” Jake leaned back in his seat and started tapping his cowboy hat against his knee, which was code for an impending volcanic eruption.

Mr. Klasky shoved an old VHS tape into the player and the fuzzy screen went black for a few seconds. The old tape began to make a whirring noise as it played.

Mitchell leaned forward with a grin on his face and his elbows on the table. This was getting interesting and his curiosity was definitely piqued. He was oddly proud of their mother for having the power and the love to get them all here for whatever this was…

His grin faded as his mom’s voice echoed through the crappy television speakers. The video feed made an odd knocking sound as the video image of his mother leaning forward to check the camera played. Satisfied, she nodded briskly then sat down in a chair positioned so her face would fill the small screen.

Holy shit. She was young. And healthy, the sick gray pallor of her cheeks nowhere to be seen. He remembered her like that, and it hurt almost as much as it made him happy.

“Hello, my precious boys. I’m going to make this tape and give it to Mr. Klasky just in case something happens to me. I don’t plan on going anywhere, but if I do, I want you boys to know I loved you more than anything and I was always proud, every single day, to be your mother.”

Jake sniffed and turned his head away. Derek sat like a stone statue and Chance was holding his breath. Mitchell strained to listen. He didn’t want to miss a single word, or smile, or sigh. He missed her so much, seeing her there was like having her back again, even if it was only for a minute.

“You boys know how much I always pushed you to follow your own hearts. Follow your dreams, I say. Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot this past year. Derek is fourteen now, and I see it happening already.

“Life is going to get ahold of you boys, and drain your dreams right out of you. I know. The real world is hard and unforgiving. Boys don’t get to have dreams anymore. They have to be men. The world is going to expect you to be hard. And I know you can be hard as nails. All of you. I know where you came from. You were born into a hard world. I tried to show you a different life, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid you’re going to grow up and forget who you really are. I don’t want you to forget your dreams.

“So, I did something a little crazy. Maybe you’ll remember, maybe you won’t, but on my birthday this year, I asked each of you to write a very special card—”

His mother’s laughter filled the quiet kitchen and Mitchell smiled back at her. God, he missed her. That laugh. No matter how messed up he’d get in his head, that laugh had always made him feel like everything was going to be okay.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Klasky to hold on to these cards for a while. Someday, I’ll die. Maybe I’ll be ninety, maybe not, but if I’m gone and you need reminding, he’s going to remind you of who you really are.”

Her expression changed from mischievous and full of herself to solemn and serious. She leaned forward until her face filled the entire screen.

“I love you. Each and every one. And you each made a promise to me, all those years ago. And dead or not, I expect you to keep it.”

She threw her head back and laughed, the sparkle back in her eye. Oh, she knew she’d won. She was gone and her boys couldn’t even argue with her now. No push back, no whining, no denial. She had them all by the shorthairs and she’d known it, all those years ago when she made the recording, she’d known her boys would keep their promises, because that was how she’d raised them.

“Dead or not. How’s that for a good one? I love you. Don’t forget who you were born to be. Open your cards now. Read them. And above all, remember why you wrote them. Keep your promises. I love you, and you know I’ll be watching.”

They all sat in stunned silence and Mitchell traced the ink his mother had used to write his name with shaking fingertips.

What was he going to do? He’d never broken a promise he made to his mother or his brothers. Never. And he didn’t want to start now. The fact that she was dead made his simple denial feel ten times worse. That one thing shouldn’t matter, but somehow it did. Heaviness settled over his heart, the ache like a bucket of ice dumped directly inside his rib cage.

He didn’t need a wish list, not anymore. The die had been cast. He’s already accomplished everything he’d written in the card. He was a surgeon. He had a life, and responsibilities, and a shit-ton of student debt to pay off. He had the car, or close enough. And the dog? Well that just didn’t fit into his life. The naïve desire of a young teenage boy to have a pet didn’t fit into the adult equation. He was never home to take care of a dog. He worked fifty or sixty hours a week.

But he could hear his mother’s voice telling him to change things, telling him to live a different life, to find a way. To stop and smell the roses. But he just didn’t see how that was possible. Not right now. Maybe not ever.

1

Six months later

Jessica Finley tapped the edge of her cell phone against her forehead and tried not to drown in the worry that made her chest tight and her head ache. Something was wrong, she could feel it. She could always feel it when her twin brother was in trouble. She couldn’t explain the hows or whys, but she just knew.

Didn’t help that she was strutting around in her pink boyshorts panties, a five-year-old tank top, and no shoes. Hell, an hour ago she’d been asleep. An hour ago, she hadn’t been fighting to keep her takeout egg rolls and kung pao chicken in her stomach either.

She flipped her phone over and texted him again. He told her he’d be home at midnight. He had an interview with a local radio station at six o’clock in the morning. And if her brother was one thing, it was professional. He’d worked his ass off for the band’s success, and he swore he’d not do anything to jeopardize that. Three years of tours and parties and crazy, and he’d never fucked up yet. Until now.

2:03 am This isn’t funny. Call me.

No answer. Her heart pounded in her chest and beside her Eddie whimpered. The hundred-and-thirty-pound Great Dane-Pit Bull mix was spotted black and white, like a Dalmatian who’d had his black spots smudged like chalk across a canvas. Eddie’s sister, Bella, was panting and jogging along behind them. She was a twelve-pound Peek-a-Poo with curly white hair, an innocent face, and the temperament of a Doberman. She ran the house, and the giant teddy-bear, Eddie, let her.

“I know, boy, I’m worried, too.” Jessica reached down and rubbed Eddie on the head, which didn’t take much since she was five-five and his head was nearly even with her waistline.

One more try, then she was going to start blowing up phones. Tyler was out with Gabriel and the boys from the band. Somebody had to have their phone on. And someone better fucking answer her.

2:06 am Are you drunk? Stoned? Dead in a gutter? Stop screwing around with me, little brother. You’re starting to scare me—which you know makes me mad.

Tyler didn’t play practical jokes. He wouldn’t scare her for no reason. He was her younger brother by seven minutes, and she’s held it over his head their entire lives. He was basically the only sane family member she had, and even that was questionable, depending on the day.

Her phone rang, her ringer turned up so loud that she nearly dropped it. She scrambled to keep it from hitting the floor, more worried than ever because that wasn’t her brother’s ringtone. No, the sound echoing through her kitchen was the plain old-fashioned telephone ringer at top volume.

Everyone she knew personally, literally, every single friend, relative, coworker, everyone had been assigned a song for their ringtone.

Shaking, she turned the phone so she could see the caller ID on the screen.

A hospital.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Finger swipe complete, she lifted the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello. I am calling for Jessica Finley.”

“Yes. This is she.” Jessica leaned over the kitchen counter, using the decades-old speckled-brown countertop to hold her up. This was bad. So bad.

“Miss Finley, I’m sorry to call so late. I’m Nurse Sandoval, an R.N. here in the emergency department of Rocky Mountain Memorial Hospital. I am calling because you are listed as the emergency contact in Tyler Travis’s cell phone.”

“Oh my God.” Jessica gave up trying to stand and turned around. Her back slid down the cabinets and she landed with a soft thud on the cold tile floor. Immediately Eddie and Bella made a beeline for her lap. Bella claimed the space between her legs, but Eddie leaned in, his head next to hers, and she wrapped a hand around the giant dog’s head and held on for dear life. “What’s wrong? What happened to him?”

“Please don’t panic, Ms. Finley. He is being assessed by our trauma team right now. He was involved in an auto accident. He’s alive and speaking to our staff. That’s all I can tell you at the moment. Dr. Walker is with him now. The doctor will be able to tell you more about Mr. Travis’s condition when you arrive.”

“Wait!” The nurse was about to hang up and Jessica could feel the long pause as Nurse Sandoval waited for Jessica to say what she had to say and let the nurse get off the phone and back to her paperwork, or patients, or the next freaked-out family member she had to call. “Tyler was with his stepbrother, Gabriel Castillo? Is he there, too? Was he in the truck?”

The nurse cleared her throat. “Just a minute. I’ll see what I can find out.”

She put Jessica on fucking hold for what felt like forever, some cheery asshole’s voice piped through the phone, telling her all about their mammography center, how amazeballs great it was to give birth to a baby in their maternity ward, and all about their state-of-the-art cardiac department. Jess wanted to throw the phone across the room, but didn’t. Instead, she sat there and listened to the entire recording—twice—before the nurse got back on the phone. Jess heard someone pick up the line and her heart literally felt like it stopped beating.

“Ms. Finley?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not supposed to tell you anything about Mr. Castillo, unless you’re family?”

“Yes. He’s my brother.” Stepbrother, and a pain in the ass, but nurse rule-maker didn’t need to know that.

“He was in the accident as well and will be arriving in about ten minutes.”

“What?” How was that even possible? “But, I don’t understand. Why is Tyler there without Gabriel if they were both in the accident?”

“Mr. Travis was brought in by Flight-For-Life, Ms. Finley. The ambulance transporting Mr. Castillo should be here in about ten minutes.”

“Thank you.” She hung up and hugged Eddie, hard, for all of five seconds. They’d flown Tyler on an emergency helicopter to one of the top trauma hospitals in the city? Flight-For-Life? That was bad. Bad. Bad.

Was he going to die? Did he still have all his arms and legs? Could he walk? Did he have broken bones? Cracked skull? Had his head hit the steering wheel so hard he had amnesia and wouldn’t recognize her when she got there?

“Shut up, Jess.” She wasn’t talking to herself, not really. As a freelance journalist, an entertainment specialist, Jess wrote a lot of fluff about a shit-ton of famous people she didn’t care about, and a lot of in-depth articles about those she did.

Running for her room, she yanked on the clothes she’d dropped to the floor less than three hours ago, an old black-and-gold CU Buffalo sweatpants, a T-shirt from her favorite incense shop on Pearl Street in Boulder, and a pair of sandals that showed off her new neon-green toenail polish.

She raced to the counter to grab her purse and keys. The dogs would be fine. They had food, water, and a dog door big enough for a linebacker to crawl through. Eddie looked mean as hell, but if a burglar ever broke into the house, Bella would bite his ankles and Eddie would probably climb into his lap and roll over to have his belly rubbed. Big baby.

“Be good, you two. I’ll be back.” She ran for her seafoam-green electric car and slammed the door hard enough to wake the neighbors, especially her friend, the widowed Ms. Beatrice Brown next door. The elderly firecracker was eighty, if she was a day, lived alone, and never missed a single thing going on up and down their street. She was like a one-woman neighborhood watch squad. She also made the most delicious homemade muffins Jessica had ever tasted.

Sure enough, Jessica flinched when the kitchen light flickered to life next door in Miss Bea’s house.

“Sorry, Bea.” Shaking like a leaf, she whispered her apology from the driver’s seat and put the small car in gear. Probably shouldn’t be driving, but there was no way she was staying home, and she didn’t want to waste a half hour calling a cab. The wheels rolled forward and she slammed on the brake to rest for a hot minute, hands on the steering wheel, trying to get calm enough not to kill herself on the ten-minute drive to the hospital. It wasn’t far. It was late. There wouldn’t be much traffic. Right?

Jessica pulled away from the curb, her heart lodged in the back of her throat. She had no idea who the hell this Dr. Walker was, but he better be good. He better be a doctoring genius.

He better be just like her father, Dr. Richard Travis, neurosurgeon with both a medical degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry. Dr. Walker better be an experienced freaking virtuoso, and he better not make any mistakes. If anything happened to her brother, Dr. Richard Travis’s oh-so-precious, sacred, and only biological son, her dad would be on a jet out of New York tomorrow to kick Dr. Walker’s ass into next week.

Or not. Hell, he’d probably just send his lawyers. That seemed to be more his style the last few years.

Imagining the esteemed Dr. Walker looking after her brother was helping her keep calm as she drove. She could just see him now, aged and refined, with serious gray eyes and silver hair. He’d be calm and confident, quiet yet clearly in complete control. He had to be, because that was the only line of thinking that was going to get her to the hospital in one piece.

A few minutes later she pulled into the parking lot, followed the signs for the emergency room and waited impatiently for the security guard to let her in past the locked glass doors. She could see the waiting room and the nurses’ station from here. She wondered which one of them was the no-nonsense woman who had called her.

She stomped up to the bored guard with her ID out. “My brother is in the ER. Nurse Sandoval called me.”

He looked at her over her ID, handed it back to her and pressed a button. The doors buzzed and he waived her in. “Nurses’ station ahead on the right.”

“Thanks.” Head down, she marched through the nearly empty lobby. There was an elderly man speaking to his grown children. Jessica heard them talking about a stroke and assumed their mother must be in here somewhere. A young man sat with his hand wrapped in a kitchen towel soaked with blood. Looked like a cut, not bad, which would be low priority right now with a trauma case here and another on the way. All in all, the place wasn’t bad for two in the morning on a Saturday.

There was only one nurse seated at the station, and about three more buzzing around like bees in a hive. She could hear muffled, but urgent, voices coming from down the hall, but couldn’t make out a damn thing. Was Tyler in that room, behind the curtain?

“Can I help you?” The nurse spoke and Jessica had been so focused on trying to figure out what was going on that she jumped.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped up to the counter. “I’m Jessica Finley. Nurse Sandoval called about my brother, Tyler Travis.”

“Umm-hmmm. Just a minute.” The nurse was Hispanic, with gorgeous black hair pulled into a braid and skin that hadn’t aged. She was in her forties, and looked like she knew what she was doing. Jessica knew an experienced nurse beat a new doctor any day of the week.

“Are you Nurse Sandoval?” Jessica leaned over, trying to read the woman’s nametag, but she couldn’t see around the edge of the computer monitor.

“Yes, dear. Let me see.” The nurse checked some charts and some handwritten notes. “Your brother Gabriel will be here any minute. I don’t have any information on him, other than the paramedics radioed ahead that he’s stable.”

Jessica felt some of the tension leave her. One brother down, one to go. “What about Tyler?”

“Tyler Travis.” The nurse lifted a long medical chart from a stand-up file next to her and nodded her head. Her dark brown eyes softened around the edges and she tilted her head as she looked up. Jessica knew that look. Between her parents, she’d spent enough time around medical staff to write a manual. She knew that look.

“What’s wrong with my brother?”

“I don’t have his chart, honey. He was taken to surgery. Surgical waiting is on the second floor. I’ll call ahead and let them know you’re coming.”

2

Mitchell found the bleeder running into his patient’s spleen and pinched it between his thumb and first two fingers. “Clamp.”

The nurse on his right was new, and he didn’t know her name. Didn’t care, not right now. He had a twenty-five-year-old male bleeding to death on the table. Time to work. Time to play God and cheat death. Time to do what he fucking loved to do.

“Suction. More suction. I can’t see a damn thing.”

The nurse across from him, Brenda, had been working the OR longer than he’d been alive, and she pushed and shoved the patient’s internal organs aside with practiced ease to get him the clear view he needed. When the abdominal cavity didn’t immediately begin to fill with bright red blood, he sighed in relief and got to work. This guy didn’t need a spleen. Not anymore. Not if he wanted to survive the night.

The kidneys were bruised, and the patient probably had a concussion. The seat belt that had most likely saved his life had also struck hard and low across the patient’s abdomen. Mitchell hoped the man didn’t end up with a necrotic section of intestine, but only time would tell. He would have to be watched closely for a few days.

“His pressure is stabilizing. I think that was the last bleed.” The nurse anesthetist smiled at him when he glanced up and he nodded his head. Her name was Sylvia, she was divorced, eight years older than he was, and she’d made it blatantly clear on more than one occasion that he would be more than welcome in her bed.

“Good. I don’t see anything else. Brenda?” Mitchell waited as the experienced OR nurse standing across from him bent over the patient’s gut and moved her suction wand around, looking for more bleeds. She was good. Very good. She had more than two decades’ worth of experience in trauma surgery and his attending had taught him right out of the gate to respect that. When it came to saving someone’s life, there was no room for competition or bullshit. A good nurse was gold. Pure, fucking gold.

“I think we’re good.” Brenda lifted her head to another nurse who was busy on the edges of the room grabbing supplies and keeping track of everything they had opened. “Start counting, Deb, or we’ll be in here all night.”

“On it.” Deb sounded young, but Mitchell didn’t know who she was. Must be new. As ordered, she started counting every piece of gauze, every clamp, every suture, needle, instrument and towel that had been used. The buckets were full of blood-stained gauze. The patient had taken two units of blood and three lactose ringers in the last couple hours. Everything had to be counted so he didn’t accidentally leave a surprise inside the patient’s gut and have to go back in later to get it. That shit didn’t exactly dissolve.

Mitchell took a deep breath and relaxed for the first time since this blond-haired young man had been rushed from the helipad to triage. The aftereffects of his adrenaline rush began to crash his system and he knew if he didn’t get this finished soon he’d spend the next few hours with his feet hurting, his mouth feeling like it had been stuffed with cotton and a crink in his neck that would last a week.

He spent another half hour making sure he’d gotten everything and stitching up a couple small liver lacerations that probably didn’t need it, but Mitchell didn’t like taking chances. Ever. When he asked for the stapler, Brenda helped him hold the man’s gut in place as he punched through the patient’s skin with enough stainless steel to make the guy look like a living zipper. He’d have a huge scar from the bottom of his sternum to his pubic bone, but he’d live.

“Good job, Doctor.” Brenda settled her blood-coated gloved hand over his and squeezed. Mitchell nodded at her and smiled, knowing she’d see the crinkles in the corners of his eyes behind the plastic splatter screen on his surgical mask.

“You, too. Thanks, everyone.”

Brenda nodded and got straight back to business. “Okay, team. Let’s finish this and get him into recovery. I’m sure he’s got family waiting, Doctor. Better go put them out of their misery.”