Chapter One
TWELVE-HOUR SHIFTin the ER—seventeen patients, three biters, and eight cups of subpar waiting room coffee. However you did the math, that was a long day. Tag frowned at his reflection in the fly-specked mirror as he looped the black silk tie around his neck. Unfortunately it wasn’t over yet.
Music—the unchallenging strains of familiar classical airs barely a step up from elevator Muzak—filtered up through the floor as he fumbled with his collar. Back in med school, nose deep in cricothyroidotomies and venous cannulation, he’d imagined himself at the cutting edge of neurological research at this stage in his career. Instead he was struggling with a bow tie before he went out to pick his colleagues’ pockets for grant money.
Four years ago he imagined he’d be happily married and settled down with a dog or possibly even a kid by now. Instead he was unhappily separated, and all his friends, the ones he still had since he left New York and moved to Plenty, CA three years ago, thought he needed to go and fuck someone new—as though something that lasted five years could really be over in two months.
Fold back, pinch the end, and through the loop….
The bow tie looked like a dog had tied it and then chewed on it. Tag gave one lopsided loop a halfhearted tug in an attempt to straighten it. Instead it just unraveled.To hell with it.He pulled the strip of silk loose from his collar and tossed it back into his locker. Emergency room doctors were supposed to be the bad boys of medicine. Tag unbuttoned the top two buttons on his collar and tugged it loose around his throat. There. That was on-brand.
Tag lifted the black tuxedo jacket off the hanger and shrugged it on. He’d bought it before the hospital’s big charity ball ten years ago, when he was a first-year medical resident. It seemed like a ridiculous expense at the time, but if nothing else, it motivated him to stay in shape. The waistband of the trousers was only a shade too tight—too many night shifts, too much Chinese takeout—but the fabric of the jacket still caught satisfyingly across the width of his shoulders.
It would do.
He raked his fingers through his hair, pushed the day’s frustrations to the back of his brain, and headed downstairs. The lobby had been decorated with swags of brand-red fabric and glossy white balloons, and long trestle tables were scattered around and laden with one-bite morsels to keep the donors content and talking.
Surgeons in evening wear, rented tuxes in black and floor-length gowns in the recommended muted jewel tones, chatted with businessmen and lawyers over glasses of midprice champagne. Cardio and neurology mostly, Tag noticed. They always had it easiest. Rich people worried about heart attacks and strokes before anything else.
ER was down the list. People never thought accidents would happen to them until they did.
Tag tucked a hand in his pocket, grabbed a glass of wine from a passing waiter, and headed out to worry some rich people. Car crashes, aneurysms, the unpleasant parasites you could bring home from visiting summer homes in exotic locales. Brains were sexy, but emergency medicine had variety on its side.
Half an hour later he had worked his way through a quarter of the room and tapped out his ability to laugh at borderline offensive humor. He leaned against a pillar, wine swapped for a glass of ice water, and waited to see if hotel heiress Hetty Alderdice’s anecdote about her trip to London would veer dubiously into race, gender, or ability. When it didn’t, he chuckled with polite relief.
“I actually had a patient who was in London last month,” he remarked as the laughter faded. Positioned at Alderdice’s elbow, Ned Blake, Tag’s best friend and pediatric oncology’s finest, rolled his eyes at the five-year-old story and then turned to grab another glass of champagne from a waiter’s tray. “Well, London and Madagascar. When she got sick, she blamed Madagascar, but actually she’d gotten rat-bite fever from a—”
“Tag,” Ned interrupted just as he hit his rhythm. “Here. You’ll need this.”
He shoved the flute into Tag’s hand. Straw-colored fizz slopped over the rim and trickled stickily over Tag’s fingers. Tag cursed and fumbled for a second, both hands full as the champagne dribbled onto his polished shoes.
“I’m fine, Ned,” he protested as he looked around for somewhere to offload the unwanted drink. “I’ve had a—”
Shit.
Tag stumbled over his own tongue as he finally saw what, or who, had made Ned think he needed a drink. His ex was here. Of course he was. Psychology needed funding too, and Kieran had always enjoyed these meat markets. Although Tag doubted the pretty boy on Kieran’s arm was here to compete for department funding.
“Son of a bitch,” Tag said. His heart crawled up into the back of his throat, the pulse of it loud in his ears, and his chest cramped painfully around where it had been.
“Is something wrong?” Alderdice asked as she raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow. She turned to follow the direction of Tag’s gaze across the crowded ballroom. She hazarded a guess. “Did someone… fall?”
“No. Nope. Nothing like that,” Ned said. He patted Alderdice’s shoulder to distract her and waved his hand at random toward one of the milling doctors. “Let me introduce you to… Bill. Dr. Havers. He’s got some wonderful stories.”
Ned grimaced at Tag, the expression either an apology or an injunction to behave, as he dragged a slightly baffled but cooperative Alderdice over to the hospital’s lead pathologist, who did, to be fair, have wonderful stories that not many people wanted to hear.
“He’s a nurse in my department,” one of the cardiologists in the group provided cheerfully as they turned to check Kieran out. He popped a cube of cheese in his mouth and added as he chewed, “Apparently they got caught fucking in Dr. Pierce’s office by that ER guy he was dating.”
Accurate enough, although Tag hadn’t realized the guy was a cardiology nurse. All he knew was that he had a tacky tattoo of a winged heart on his ass and was, in Kieran’s words, “Exciting, like you used to be.”
The cardiologist’s companion untangled her arms from her shawl so she could jab him in the ribs with a sharp elbow. “Shut up,” she hissed through still red lips.
“What?” the cardiologist protested as he rubbed his ribs. “It’s what I heard, that’s—”
Fuck it.Tag drained the glass of champagne in one unsatisfying draft, handed off the water to a confused lawyer, and stalked out. He managed not to look back to see if Kieran had noticed his departure, but he wanted to. In fact, it was only after he grabbed his bag, called for a driver from the hospital’s car service to come get him, and went out into the street to wait for it in the rain that some breathless little part of him gave up on the idea that Kieran would chase after him.
God knew why. He never had before. “If you want to storm out,” he always said, “you get to crawl back too.” There had been days, weeks, when their relationship was caught in limbo between the fight and Tag’s apology.
Now it was Kieran who had—royally—fucked up, and he showed no signs he wanted to apologize.
