Barbara Boswell - Bachelor Doctor

“Holding up okay?” Trey’s inquiry nearly startled Callie into dropping a gauze sponge. Thankfully, her reflexes were too sharp to permit such a lapse.

“Me?” she murmured, trying to suppress her astonishment.

Trey had ceased lecturing and was asking her a personal question. If she was holding up okay. That had never happened before.

She’d been with him in surgery for nine or ten hours straight without him once mentioning thirst, hunger, sore muscles—or even the need for a bathroom break. He didn’t acknowledge such mundane concerns, for himself or others.

“Sheely?” he prompted, and his brow furrowed with what might have been concern.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly. But she was perplexed by his unusual solicitousness. Did she look ready to drop or something? Or to drop something? He wouldn’t like that!

“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.