Page 3

Three

Being single past 30 is like playing hide and seek except no one’s looking for you.

— Aella’s secret thoughts

AELLA

I watched the seriously grumpy man in jeans and a tight black t-shirt storm down the hall, knowing it was Chevy’s brother without having to be told.

The two men looked eerily similar.

Tall, gorgeous, and dark.

This one, though, I hadn’t seen before.

I wondered why.

A few minutes later, Chevy’s sister came, a frown on her face.

If I thought the brother’s frown was ferocious, though, it was nothing compared to Chevy’s.

I watched as he walked up to the board that showed his surgeries for the day, arms crossed over his chest, anger tight in his features.

What had happened?

“I’m sorry, Chevy,” Val said quietly from beside him. “I didn’t know you’d be in there with someone.”

He cursed under his breath, then said, “Sorry. It’s not your fault. I just have a friend with boundary issues, and a brother that is in love with that friend.”

Ruh-roh.

That didn’t sound good.

“Want to tell me about it?” Val asked.

Chevy sat down heavily onto a chair, and at first I thought that was a big, resounding hell no .

But then he started talking, and I realized that he was just collecting his thoughts.

Val was one of maybe a handful of people that Chevy actually liked talking to, and if anyone could get him to talk, it was her.

I wasn’t sure why that was, but it was something I was highly interested in.

Then again, anything that had to do with Dr. Chevy Clayborne interested me.

Even that woman that he said was a friend that looked at him like he was more.

“My brother and my friend, Reign, were best friends when we were younger. When my brother went away, he tasked me with taking care of her. Honestly, I was a selfish little shit when I was younger, and didn’t much care to have anything to do with her. When we moved here, she followed, and that’s when I really started to realize that we’d just kind of forgotten her existence. One day, Copper asked about her, and I realized that I should’ve tried a little harder. I reached out, and from then on, we’ve been friends.” Chevy scrubbed his hands down his face. “Reign is a sickly woman. She’s been in and out of hospitals her entire life. And six months ago, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. I’ve been telling her to tell my brother, but she refuses, saying she doesn’t want to burden him.”

“Whoa,” she said. “Was that why her driver’s license was suspended?”

“Yeah, when you have seizures, you’re not allowed to drive, you know?” he asked. “I don’t know why she was driving today, honestly. What I do know was that she knew better.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Val said. “Are you going to tell your brother?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I’m not losing the family I just got back.”

Where had they gone if he’d just gotten them back, I wondered. I felt like I was missing a piece of the puzzle.

Though it was likely I’d never know.

I didn’t have that kind of relationship with him, and more importantly, I was a wiener when it came to talking to attractive men.

They made my tongue get all tied up in knots.

But make that man look like Chevy Clayborne, with his sexy, dark good looks and his grumpy personality, and I was just lost.

Oh, and let’s not forget that he was part of a motorcycle club, though I didn’t know which one.

I’d done enough binge watching Sons of Anarchy to know that a biker would be just my style.

Though, that was imaginary me.

Reality me was too scared to do anything more than smile at the man.

And some days I couldn’t even do that.

I’d bet on my life he thought I was weird.

“Hey, Aella,” Dru called out. “Could you help me with a patient that just got out of surgery?”

I stood up, and that’s when Chevy turned.

I saw the look on his face before I left the nurses’ station, and I felt kind of bad, because it was obvious that he didn’t know that I’d been there.

Which made me feel like shit, because I hadn’t been hiding.

In fact, I’d been right there, out in the open, plain as day.

Was I that unremarkable that I couldn’t be spotted out in the open?

Shoulders deflating a little bit more, as if my day couldn’t get any worse after finding my rent gone and my mother the one to take it, now I had to be reminded that I was unnoticeable.

“What can I help you with?” I asked quietly.

Dru smiled and gestured toward a room that was about two doors down from the main entrance into the ward.

“Twenty-eight-year-old patient just had an ACL repair. She was going to go to same day, but they hit a snag with her surgery before our shift started and they admitted her. I just need help getting her bandages changed and her sheets changed,” she explained.

I didn’t understand the need for that until I got into the room and saw that the patient was well over six hundred pounds.

No wonder she couldn’t do it by herself.

Dru was five foot if she was wearing shoes, and probably a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.

It felt super weird standing next to Dru because I wasn’t super tall for a woman at five-foot-six, but I felt like a monster standing next to her.

Dru was adorably sweet and vertically challenged.

She didn’t act like she was a tiny little thing, though.

She was all take charge and kill everybody that got in her way.

I liked her a lot, and she was by far my favorite person to work with when I was coming in for a shift.

Which was, sadly, quite a bit.

I worked my ass off, went to school full-time, and volunteered in what little time I had left at the local animal shelter.

I was anything if not strategic.

I knew that I was pretty mediocre when it came to life.

I wasn’t the best in my class, but I wasn’t the worst.

I’d graduated high school middle of my class.

I’d gone to work straight out of high school to raise enough money to put myself through college without student debt, and I never got past entry level because being a manager took too much time and effort on my part when I didn’t want to be there anyway.

Needless to say, I wasn’t this fantastical person.

There was a reason that Chevy barely noticed me.

“Hello,” Dru said to the patient. “How are we feeling?”

“Be feeling better if you got this sheet changed already,” the patient grumbled.

I looked at Dru, who looked at me, and she smiled.

I’d been here four hours now, with eight hours to go, and I had a feeling this patient was going to by far be the worst.

Generally, we don’t like to take too long to make patients comfortable.

Likely, what had happened was she asked for her bedding to be changed and she’d wanted it done right then and there.

I doubted Dru would’ve dallied.

That wasn’t Dru’s personality.

She was a machine, always making sure that her patients were taken care of.

“I’m sorry for the delay, ma’am,” Dru replied. “We had to wait for a different type of sheet to go on the bed that you have.”

Ahh, that made sense.

The bed that the woman was on wasn’t our normal type of bed.

She likely wouldn’t have fit in the regular ones.

“Well, I asked for help with this over twenty minutes ago,” the patient said defensively.

“Are you ready to get up yet?” Dru asked hopefully.

“I’m not planning on getting up at all,” the patient replied. “You’ll just have to deal with the messes.”

So that was what had happened.

Instead of getting up, she’d likely soiled herself.

Great.

Obese patients weren’t anything new.

But belligerent, mean ones were.

And if this woman wasn’t willing to help at all…

“Dru,” I said. “I’m going to grab a few more hands so we can get this done a little bit faster.”

Dru looked thankful as I hustled my ass out of the room.

I stopped the first male I saw, which happened to be Dr. Marsh.

Ugh.

I hated talking to him any day, but we weren’t going to make this happen without strength.

“Hey, Dr. Marsh.” I stopped in front of him. “Do you mind helping us transfer a patient onto a new bed sheet?”

Dr. Marsh rolled his eyes. “What do I get for helping you?”

Me not telling your wife that you keep hitting on me…

“A high five?” I asked.

“I’ll take a high five,” a male orderly that I loved called out.

I smiled at DiAngelo and said, “I’ll take it!”

“I’ll go get help,” DiAngelo replied when he peeked into the room I’d just come out of.

I smiled at him thankfully and headed back into the room, busying myself with putting on gloves—because there was no way I was willing to touch feces—and cleaning up the room.

How a single individual that was unable to get out of bed made such a big mess, I didn’t know.

There were food wrappers on the floor, a spill from what looked to be a soda bottle on the opposite side of the bed from the door, and a bag of clothes that looked like they’d exploded everywhere.

I gathered all of the clothes up and placed them onto the guest chair in the corner of the room.

Just when I was standing up, the temperature of the room changed.

I looked over my shoulder to see Chevy enter the room.

He took one look at the situation in front of us and rolled his eyes.

I hid a smile and said, “Okay, our backup has arrived.”

“This is ridiculous. I requested only females to help me,” the patient cried out. “What if they see some of my private parts?”

“I promise, we won’t look,” DiAngelo tried to reassure the patient, but she was having none of it.

“I am a child of God,” the woman replied. “My body is a temple. I cannot, and will not, allow a male to be in the room with me when I’m this vulnerable.”

Dru was about to reassure her again that the men wouldn’t look, but Chevy lost his patience.

“Ma’am,” Chevy grumbled. “None of us want to be in here doing this. You can either stand up and move off the bed and allow only the women to help you, or you can allow us to help. It’s one of those two options. Your weight is extreme, and the two ladies in front of you would hurt themselves trying to help.”

“I do not have extreme weight!”

Chevy opened his mouth to reply, but Dru was there, soothing her ire.

“He’s going to leave now.” She gave Chevy a pointed look.

Chevy shrugged and said, “Don’t call me when she falls on you.”

Dru gritted her teeth, but I had to clamp down on my laughter.

Jesus, he was so mean sometimes. And so blunt.

He was a no-nonsense kind of guy, and I liked that about him.

He called it like he saw it, and sometimes that came off as insensitive.

Okay, a lot of times.

But still, I would rather someone blunt and honest than a fucking sweet, bald-faced liar like my mom.

Just thinking about her made me so angry I could scream.

Luckily, I’d been smart when I’d hidden my latest stack of cash.

I’d also put an AirTag into the bag that it was in, knowing she’d likely take the whole thing.

I’d been right, and I knew exactly where she went.

Today, after work, I’d be heading that way.

“Okay, let’s get this going.” Dru clapped.

The patient snorted. “About time, but wait just one…”

That’s when I saw liquid start to leak from the bed and onto the floor.

This bitch…

I was in a raging bad mood by the time my shift ended.

That patient that I’d said was going to be a problem?

Yeah, she’d been a fucking problem.

She’d been a major problem.

Honestly, if she was still on the floor in two days when I came back, I was going to quit.

With myself being the only tech on shift for the last two days due to a stomach virus making the rounds through hospital staff, I was overworked anyway.

But this bitch…

I pulled up the Find My app on my phone and hit directions that would lead me straight to my AirTag and started off.

Luckily, the sexy grump of a doctor wasn’t there to watch as I started my car this time.

Unluckily, I needed gas, and I always got a little anxious when I had to put fuel in my tank with it running.

But no surprises—or explosions—came my way and I arrived at the location of my AirTag within twenty minutes of leaving the hospital.

I came to a stop at a set of double gates and looked beyond the gates to the building nestled in the middle of the large lot.

A barndominium, by the looks of it.

There were tracks that led around to the back of the building, which was likely where people parked when they were here.

I bit my lip, wondering whether I should announce myself or not, but then decided against that.

My mother would just hide the money or refuse to come out.

This way, at least she would be surprised…