Page 4

“What?” he asked, leaning down closer to me.

Did he realize how close he was? Suddenly, the warmth from his body joined the heated embarrassment that had my skin fairly glowing, and I pressed my back harder against the wall. I lowered my hand and risked a look up to his eyes. Bright, summer green greeted my glance, and the vibrancy of his eyes stole the words from my mouth. He was mesmerizing—sunshineand nature and laughter boxed up tight in an irritated scowl. How did anyone talk to this man coherently?

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. My gaze flitted to the doors in desperation, and suddenly, I didn’t care if this man got me fired or hated me or thought I was a monster from Hell. I needed to get away from him. Dr. Reed followedthe path of my gaze, and fast as a viper, he smacked the “door close” button on the panel. “Dr. Coldwell, I want an explanation for—”

There was no way I was going to stay trapped in the elevator with this mind-boggling person. I dashed past him, and without even giving him a proper apology, I slipped through the doors just as they closed. I glimpsed a flash of his furious expression, and then the silver doors pressed together. I ran through the lobby of our building to the glass doors.

I was so fired.

Chapter two

Cal

Cal

That matchmaker was so fired.

If she could even be called a matchmaker. What was her doctorate in, fraud? There was no way she had actually paired me with Candy and hadn’t noticed who that woman was in relation to me. It wasn’t hard to miss who people’s previous relationships had been with. Unless Candy had lied about having been married to my sister. I wouldn’t put it past her, but if this “matchmaker” had done five minutes of research, she would have found out that Candy Lorensen wasnota good match for me.

In fact, that bat out of Hell was the last possible person I wanted to see because she was currently responsible for the most miserable state of affairs I’d had to endure since my residency. It was because my sister had gotten divorced that my parents hadswung their beady, baby-hungry gazes to me in the first place.

My shoes ate the pavement like ravenous alligator jaws, and I slammed the crosswalk button when I reached the end of the sidewalk. Lush, low-hanging boughs shrouded the warm sunlight overhead, which dispelled some of the humid heat. August in Eugene, Oregon wasn’t terrible, but there were days it felt like I was living in a swamp rather than the Northwest. The sign blinked into a white walking signal.

I crossed the street of historical downtown Eugene, equally as annoyed with the fact that I’d allowed my parents to convince me to go to Kiss-Met as I was with the turn of eventsaftergoing there. My parents were obnoxiously ruthless about whether or not I was “settling down,” and it took every ounce of patience I had to not ask them if they’d been reading too many Regency novels or if they really thought that was a thing people my age still did.

Settling down. Like I was a spinning top out of control. I had been nothingbutcontrol since I’d been in middle school. For them to suggest otherwise was simply insulting. At one point, they’d been on my case for dating but never choosing, and that had largely contributed to abandoning the dating scene in the first place. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a date—I probably could if I wanted to put myself through the torture.

But I didn’t want arealdate. I wanted a convenient date. I’d hoped the dating agency would pair me with someone adequate, they would be up for a double date with my parents, and we could move on with our lives after Mom and Dad realized itwas a lost cause.

Of course, my scheme to find a respectable partner for Friday had only added emotional injury to insult when thatdoctorhad paired me with Candy. The mere memory of that awkward encounter had me clenching my fists at my sides. Unbelievable. Eugene wasn’t an enormous city, I knew that, but of all people…

I reached the urgent care clinic, and with barely leashed fury, I wrenched open the front door and breezed into the air-conditioned lobby. Annie looked up from her computer screen, probably intending to welcome a patient, and then her eyes sparked with recognition. “Oh, hey Dr. Reed. How was your meeting?”

“Fine,” I smiled tightly.Horrible. I want to wring that woman’s neck.

“Oh boy,” she muttered, her dark eyes bouncing with worry. Annie tucked her brown bob behind her ears, and fighting a smile, turned her attention back to the monitor. She, and most employees in the center, knew about my disastrous blind date. She also knew Kiss-Met was responsible because several of us had joined together for the same reasons. Not to find anyonerealas far as partners went, but to get halfway decent dates before we attended an award ceremony at the end of the month.

I passed several people in the waiting area, smiling and waving at them before I opened one of the two doors that separated the cozy, living room-style front office from the back rooms and nurses’ station. The nurses’ station had been built in the middleof the back annex like a central hub, and it curved around in a half-circle that gave us a line of sight to each of the seven exam rooms in the clinic. There were four computers set up along the desk, fighting for space with piles of paperwork, filing baskets, and random, mobile medical units.

Annie followed, and her white tennis shoes squeaked against the laminate wood floors as she came in hot on my heels. “He failed,” she announced.

Several people looked up from the nurses’ station. Michael—our newest nurse—groaned from behind his mask, and Lynette sighed in disgust. The other nurse at the station, Harper, shook her head like that was exactly what she’d expected from me. I stopped, rotating an irritated look Annie’s way before glaring at the rest of them. “Excuse me, ‘failed?’”

“They didn’t fix the issue, did they?” Annie supplied.

“How are we supposed to find dates if the person in charge of making dates is garbage?” Harper asked accusatorily, her blond eyebrows lifting with concern over her green medical mask. “You didn’t get answers from her?” Harper looked like she was a sophomore in high school, and she often got questioned about whether or not she was “qualified” to be a medical technician. Her bright pink hair didn’t help that much. She just wanted a date so men would stop erroneously asking her out.

“Okay, wait a second,” I scowled at them all. “No one told me I was going to war for the entire medical center.”

“Obviously,” Michael said sourly. Like me, he had a pair of overzealous parents who wanted him to look appropriately “paired.” Only, according to him, it was “level 9000” because their family legacy was involved, or something.

“Ididfind the ‘doctor’ in charge of the pairs,” I clarified, my hands on my hips as the employees faced me in silent criticism. “But she literally ran away from me before I could get any solid answers.”

“So, we’re dateless?” Harper glared.

Lynette laughed finally, the deep wrinkles around her eyes creasing. Michael pointed at her. “We will have silence from the happily married crowd.”

Lynette raised her hands, still laughing quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think thirty years of marriage would be an asset at an urgent care center, but apparently, I got lucky.”