Escort (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (24 page)

“And, Dr. Belkin, you’ve come in on your
days off to meet with patients who took a bad turn. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve
even gone so far as to treat patients when you were on mandatory leave — that
mandatory leave, by the way, having been ordered because you refuse to take a
day off and the hospital was concerned you were going to burn out.”

“What’s your point?” Dr. Preston asks.

“My point is that I know what I did was
unethical and I know that you’re going to have no choice but to seek discipline
for my actions, but isn’t it about time that we stop worrying so much what drug
companies and insurance companies think and just start doing what’s actually
best for our patients?”

I already know I’ve lost all hope of any
kind of leniency, but that’s no reason for me to shut up now.

“I understand the reason for not having
personal relationships, particularly to the level of my relationship with Grace
Miller,” I tell the committee. “There’s objectivity, and there’s objectivity.
While none of us may be capable of complete objectivity, this kind of
relationship can cloud judgment to the point where we actually harm the patient
in the process of saving them. Maybe that’s what I’ve done here, maybe not. I’m
sitting here before you today not to pretend ignorance of the rules and codes,
possibly laws that I’ve broken, but because it is my job to treat my patients
the best way I possibly can. So let me save you all a lot of time. I did what
I’m accused of doing. I knew it was in violation of the rules. I am not sorry
that I did it, and I would do it again.”

There, I feel better.

I’ve just torpedoed my career, but I feel
better.

“Dr. Churchill, if you’ll excuse us,” Dr.
Preston says.

“Yeah,” I answer, standing.

I’m sure that all of them had more
questions, but I made it really easy for them. I did what they say I did and I
did it knowing that I was breaking the rules.

I walk out of the room, not anticipating a
long discussion.

More than once, I pull out my phone
because I want to talk to Grace. I want to see how she’s doing, and I want to
be with her. More than anything, I just want to talk to her.

After that day in the chemo lab of
Parkside Hospital, she hasn’t been answering her phone or her door.

This round of chemo is over, though, and
the plans I made after leaving Melissa in my apartment that night are almost
complete.

The hearing was going to go the way it was
going to go even if I didn’t accuse pretty much everyone else in the room of
impropriety. The hearing was always going to end the way it’s about to end.

Whether it’s my whole career or just the
immediate future of it, one way or another, this is going to put a mark on my
record that’s never going to come off and I’m sure that at the very least I’m
going to get fired.

I can’t do anything about that. What
matters, though, is what happens after the hearing. Whether I have a viable
career or not, there’s something I need to know.

Deliberations, as I thought they would be,
are short. Dr. Preston opens the door and tells me that they’ve come to a
decision.

I rise once more and adjust my tie before
following him back into the room. There’s a part of me that still has hope, but
that’s the stupider part of me.

Everyone in the room is looking at me
intently as I walk back in, but nobody speaks. We all know where this is going
and how it’s going to end. Dr. Star even looks like she feels bad regarding
what’s about to happen. That doesn’t mean she’s going to do anything about it.

“Dr. Churchill,” Dr. Preston starts. “I
want to begin by saying that the committee recognizes that you are a talented
physician who has, in the past, been a credit to our hospital. However, in
light of the events surrounding your treatment of Grace Miller, specifically
the falsifications that took place…”

He trails off when somebody’s phone starts
ringing. I wish it was less obvious that the phone is mine. No doubt it’s Yuri
calling for the sixteenth time since she blew the whistle on me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, pressing the mute
button. “Please go on.”

“…and the inappropriate nature of the
relationship between you and this patient,” he continues, “this committee has
no choice but to find you in breach of hospital policy and the ethical
standards of this profession according to the AMA. It is not lost on us, Dr.
Churchill, that you performed this fraud in order to provide your patient with
a chance she wouldn’t have had otherwise, but this does not excuse your
actions.

“To that end, it is the finding of the
board that you should be suspended without pay for a period of no less than
four weeks, effective immediately, after which, we will reconvene to decide
where to go from there. I want to impress upon you, Dr. Churchill, that despite
your protests that any other doctor would behave as you have, we do have rules
and those rules are there for your protection, the hospital’s protection, and
the protection of our patients.”

“Four weeks?” I ask.

“Yes,” Dr. Preston answers.

“That’s it?”

Where am I going with this?

“Excuse me?” Dr. Preston returns.

“If the codes of conduct that I’ve been
found to have violated are indeed
so
serious as you
would make out then why is my license being spared at all?” I ask.

“First off, we haven’t decided not to
recommend the revocation of your license, Dr. Churchill. Still, some feel that,
although you have been misguided, there is still an opportunity for you to do
good things at this hospital,” Dr. Preston answers. “If you have an objection
to that point of view, however, we would be more than happy to revisit the
subject.” Dr. Preston says, “At the end of four weeks, we will reconvene to
decide whether or not to recommend that your license be revoked permanently.”

So that’s it. My career is up in the air.

In a lot of ways, the hearing went better
than expected, but there’s no way of telling what’s going to happen next, and
I’m not too optimistic about coming back here in four weeks.

If nothing else, though, it’s over for
now. I’ve got a month between now and a final decision: Plenty of time to
update and circulate my résumé, though I’m not sure who’s going to hire me.

That’s not what’s pressing on my mind,
though.

I pick up the phone and call Grace. She
doesn’t pick up, but I leave her a message, simply telling her to be by her
apartment at eight o’clock tonight.

I just hope she’s there.

Chapter Twenty-One

Learning to Breathe

Grace

I’m sitting in the back of a cab that Jace
apparently sent for me, wondering just where the hell I’m being taken.

I got
Jace’s
message.

His hearing’s over and there’s no more
damage to be done. Everything in my life has completely fallen apart.

KJBP came out with their announcement that
they accepted the offer of…it doesn’t matter. They did what I expected them to
do and chose the better deal. For me to expect anything different would have
been pure idiocy.

Rather than take personal responsibility
for her role in ensuring that M.E. would never land a contract with KJBP, Mrs.
Sutton immediately called for my termination and she got it.

John had a great big smile on his face
when he told me that I’m fired.

So that’s it. M.E. is going to stay local
and completely overlooked. Everything I’ve been working toward these last
couple of years is out the door along with me.

I don’t know what Jace is planning, but
given the way everything’s been going lately, I’m not getting my hopes up.

“We’re here, madam,” the driver says, and
I look out the window.

It’s the junkyard.

I get out of the back of the car, and I’m
surprised that Jace would want to meet me here after the last time.

We’ve drifted apart, but despite myself, I
begin to hope that things are going to change. Why would he invite me here if
there were to be no forgiveness between us?

As soon as I close the door to the cab,
the driver speeds away, leaving me standing alone next to the fence. It’s
always astounded me that whoever owns this place never invested in any kind of
security, but right now, that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve had some time to recover since my
last round of chemo, but I’m still nervous to find out how much strength I
have. The good news is, I’m able to get over the fence.

I land on the ground inside the junkyard
and I start looking around. I don’t see Jace.

The place is so dark tonight with the new
moon, but the stars are out in force.

I pull out my phone and call
Jace’s
number.

“You’re here,” he answers.

“How very creepy of you to say,” I
respond. “Where are you?”

“I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

“That’s all well and good,” I tell him,
“but if I don’t know where you are…”

“You know exactly where I am,” he says.
“I’ll see you when you get here.”

He hangs up and I start walking again.
Even with all the stars, the night is so dark that I’m having a little trouble
finding the correct path through all of the wreckage. Soon enough, though, I’m
through and staring up at the Ferris wheel.

I don’t see Jace.

I pull out my phone and call him again.

“You coming up or what?” he asks.

He’s at the top? Last time, he vowed that
he’d never climb “that fucking thing” again. I gaze up at the Ferris wheel,
trying to spot him, and I manage to make out his shadow against the backdrop of
the night sky.

That’s a surprise, all right.

“Come on!” he shouts from the top. “I
don’t have all night!”

A thrill flows through me and I make my
way to the base of the ladder. Climbing up, I forget my usual fear and just
keep putting one hand above the other.

As I get toward the top, though, that
trepidation returns and I’m slow to make it to where I can look over the top of
the ladder and see Jace sitting in the car.

“You’ve got this,” he says as he holds out
his hand.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “What am
I doing here?”

“Why don’t we talk about this after you’re
in the car?”

I climb up and reach out to him. He takes my
hand. It takes a little bit of maneuvering and my life flashing before my eyes
more than once, but I manage to get into the car.

Jace reaches forward, puts the pin in the
front of the restraint, and turns to look at me.

“What are we doing here?” I ask him as I
try to get my body to stop shaking.

“We’re both overcoming our fears,” he
says. “They say that the only way to do that is to confront them directly, so
here we are.”

“That’s very new age of you,” I tell him,
“but you didn’t send a car for me just so I could-”

He reaches down to his side and produces a
small bottle of wine.

“It’s nothing fancy,” he says, “but it’s
all I could fit in my pocket for the climb up.”

“How did your hearing go?” I ask.

“I’m suspended until they can figure out
what to do with me. I was hoping for a little less, but considering that they
could have fired me and immediately called for the revocation of my license,
I’d say it’s a win.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been ducking your calls,”
I tell him. “At first, I was telling myself that I didn’t want to further
jeopardize your career by somehow influencing you to go out of your way to
protect me during the hearing. When I realized they’d already done everything
they could do to me, though, I realized that I wasn’t answering the phone
because I wasn’t ready for what you and I were turning into.”

“And what’s that?”

“You put your career on the line for me,”
I tell him. “You did that before we were even in a relationship. I don’t know —
that kind of selflessness isn’t something I’m used to.”

“It was the right thing to do,” he says.

“They told me I was on the placebo,” I
tell him.

“They told me you were on the placebo,
too,” he says just as quickly. “They were wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On paper, you
were
on the placebo, but I may have convinced one of the orderlies
to give me access to the room where they keep the stuff. It took a while to
figure out which you were on, but as soon as I found out that it was the
placebo, I had you changed over,” he says.

“Why would you do that?”

“I wanted to give you a better shot. We
don’t have to talk about that now, though. I saw you on the news,” he says. “I
called, but you didn’t pick up.”

“Yeah,” I tell him, “that didn’t work out
for me any better than your hearing worked out for you. Actually, it went worse
because I know I’m fired.”

“Ah, to be unemployed at the top of a
Ferris wheel,” Jace says, and I’m wondering how much of that wine he’s already
drunk. As if aware of my question, he hands me the bottle, saying, “Let me know
what you think. The clerk at the liquor store said it has a velvety texture
with a bouquet of oak and citrus. As far as I can tell, though, it’s just
another bottle of wine. Maybe you can tell me what I’m missing.”

I take the bottle and have a quick drink
from it.

“It tastes like wine,” I tell him and hand
it back. “What are we doing up here?”

“I told you,” he says. “We’re conquering
our fears.”

“What does that mean, though?” I ask.
“Pretty much everything I’ve had to be afraid of in the last year has already
happened. If anything, I’d say that’s just more of a reason to be afraid.”

“You forgot something,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“Even with things going bad, we’re both
still here.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s something,” I agree.

“I know that you’ve been avoiding me,” he
says. “I know that the last time we spoke didn’t really go so well for either
of us, but I also know that I like you, Grace. You’re stubborn and you talk
like a sailor-”

“Have I ever told you exactly how
thoroughly I loathe that expression?”

“What I’m getting at, is that you’ve
brought a kind of excitement into my life that I’ve only dreamed of, and I
don’t want things to be over between us. If you’ll let me,” he says, reaching
into his pocket, “I’d like to spend the rest of my life bringing you the same
thrill that your presence brings me.”

Even in the dark, I can see that the
motherfucker’s holding an engagement ring.

“You’re not serious,” I tell him.

“Really,” he says, “I am. Grace, will you
marry me?”

All right, when the cab pulled up to the
junkyard, I figured we were probably on the road toward getting back together,
but I did not see this one coming.

“No,” I tell him. “I mean — no. I mean…
Don’t you think it’s a little soon?”

“What do you mean?” he asks. “We’ve
already been through more shit together than most people face in a lifetime.”

“First off, I don’t know if that’s true,”
I tell him. “Second off, haven’t you noticed that we’ve kind of skipped a few
steps?”

“What steps?”

“Well,” I tell him, “we’ve never lived
together. We’ve never talked about whether we each want to have kids or
anything. We’ve never sat down and planned anything except to defraud your
hospital and the clinical trial. Jace, we’ve never said ‘I love you.’”

“Well,” he says, “I
lov
-”

“Oh, don’t say it now,” I interrupt. “It
just makes it seem like you’re trying to prove a point, not that you actually
mean it.”

He’s looking at me, the ring still in his
outstretched hand.

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” I ask
with a laugh.

“Yeah,” he says. “I really do.”

“I love you for it,” I tell him.

“I love you, too,” he says. “Does that
mean-”

“Oh, hell no,” I tell him. “I’m nowhere
near prepared to get married, but I have another idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you remember what I was planning on
doing with you up here before you started flailing like a moron?” I ask.

“I take exception to most of that
question, and no,” he says. “What were you going to do with me up here?”

“Put the ring back in your pocket,” I tell
him. “You don’t want to lose it.”

He puts the ring back in his pocket, and I
kiss him on the lips. With that restraint in place, we’re not going to be able
to be too creative, but I think I’ve got a few ideas for getting around that.

Our arms are around each other, and I can
feel that Jace, despite his generally calm demeanor is shaking. Whether it’s
from the height or from the breeze or from the adrenaline of the moment, I have
no idea.

He’s pulling me close.

“Exactly how far were you planning to go?”
he asks.

“Far enough,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I have no idea what that means,” he
says. “I’m just thinking that with the bar there, we can’t, you know, and if we
unlatch the bar, I don’t think we should.”

I pull away from him and move as far as I
can to the other side of the car which, granted, is only about a foot from
where I was before. I lift my feet until they’re above the footrest and I
straighten my legs only to bend them as if I were going to cross my legs. That
way, I’m able to get my legs out from under the restraint and cross them in
front of me on the seat.

“Now you,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I get what you did there, but at
what point while my legs are hanging over the footrest does gravity decide it’s
time I was back on the ground?”

“Quit being such a pussy and just do it,”
I tell him.

“You know,” he says, “you’re really going
to have to stop calling me that one of these days.”

“You’d think so, but no. Just do it.”

It takes him a while and a fairly
impressive string of curses, but he finally manages to pull his legs up and set
his feet on the seat, mirroring me.

“Now what? There’s still a lot of-”

“Take your pants off,” I instruct.

He gives me a look as if to say, “How the
fuck am I supposed to do that?” so I turn and put my legs over the restraint. I
unbutton my pants and slip them down over my knees. Once I get them that far, I
pull my legs back toward me and pull them the rest of the way down.

When they’re off, I work my legs back to
where they were and I lift my butt to set my pants beneath me.

“Like that,” I tell him.

“I still don’t know how we’re going to-”
he starts.

“Just trust me.”

It’s not graceful or even remotely
attractive, but he does manage to get his pants off and put beneath him.

“There,” I tell him. “The rest is easy.”

I put my left leg down on the floor of the
car and I stand up enough for him to put his legs between mine. He slides down
a bit, and I position myself over him.

I’m not going to say it’s not awkward,
because it is, but once he feels my wetness on him, he seems to relax.

The particulars of the situation have him
a little less than ready, so I lean forward and kiss him deeply on the lips and
pull my shirt up just enough to encourage one of his hands underneath to rest
on my breasts.