Free His Bidding (The Best Medicine #1) by Ella Blythe

ONE
    B rynn was just readying herself for her shift, pulling her hair back into its usual blonde ponytail, when the door to the on-call room burst open, blinding her with the fluorescent light from the hallway.
    “Girl!” she heard a familiar voice whisper excitedly. “You need to go check the staff bulletin board, stat.”
    Smoothing her scrubs, Brynn laughed and shook her head. “Okay, ‘girl’!” she replied, groping around for her stethoscope on the cot she’d all too recently vacated. “Why? What’s the big news? Or are you seriously going to make me trek down three floors to find out?”
    Lisa elbowed her friend gently in the ribs. “It’s something you’ll wanna see with your own eyes. And, selfishly, I’d like to see you seeing it.”
    Brynn heaved a mock sigh, squinting at her watch. She didn’t really have much time to spare before her shift started, but she figured she could indulge her mentor if only for the sake of waking up a bit more. “Lead the way, Obi-Wan.”
    With no further encouragement needed, Lisa grabbed Brynn’s elbow and practically dragged her to the stairwell, skipping down steps as though she were a teenage girl, Brynn following just behind. Within moments they were facing the giant board of announcements next to the nurses’ station, where Lisa had been assigned for the overnight. “This was the first thing I saw when I got in,” she stage-whispered to Brynn, practically bouncing with excitement. “I was so glad to see you on the schedule. Otherwise I’d have had to call and wake you up.”
    Brynn blinked a few times, looking at the bright and colorful scraps of paper pinned this way and that on the corkboard, most of them safety bulletins and news about upcoming conferences. But then her eyes landed on an especially festive red and green flyer, featuring a few photos rather prominently...one of which caught her attention more than the others. Her jaw dropped open.
    “Oh...my God...” She blinked twice more, wanting to be sure she wasn’t hazily deluding herself. Nope. His photo was still there once her vision had cleared.
    Lisa giggled, still in the throes of adolescent glee. “I told you! Now, would that have had the same impact if I’d just blathered about it?”
    No, it wouldn’t have, Brynn thought, her heart doing a weird little hopscotch routine within her ribs. Nothing would have been quite as surprising as her seeing that Dr. Samuel Hitchens, the Chief of Staff at their hospital and her direct supervisor on the occasions she worked at his private practice, was among the staff who were offering themselves up in a “bachelor auction” for their annual Christmas charity ball. Nobody aside from Lisa knew about Brynn’s crush – if so mild a word could be used for the way she felt whenever she looked at him could be used – on the hot shot M.D., but if she stood staring at the bulletin board much longer it was bound to become obvious to the other nurses just wandering in for their shifts.
    “Maybe you should ask him for a raise, and when he wants to know why, you can tell him it’s so you can afford to buy him,” Lisa teased, and Brynn hushed her, glancing around nervously. While it was a given that practically every female nurse, doctor and administrator here had the hots for Dr. Hitchens, she didn’t want to be singled out as the one who was lining up for the next opening in his bed. Everybody knew said opening was a coveted one – and, if rumor was to be believed, that it was filled by the prettiest of the med students on his rotation more often than not.
    Her stomach twisted slightly at that thought. It was stupid to feel jealousy over a man who’d never been hers to begin with, but she found it seeping in every so often nonetheless.
    Lisa’s next whisper broke her reverie. “So? Are you gonna do it?”
    “Do what?” Brynn felt her cheeks turning as pink as her scrubs.
    “Bid on him, obviously!” Lisa quite conspicuously pointed at the line on