Free The Surgeon's Favorite Nurse by Teresa Southwick Page B

his career plan in the trash can.

Chapter Six
    T wo days after sleeping with Jake, Hope walked into the office of Mercy Medical West’s president and tried to act professional. Val Davis was in her fifties, an attractive brown-eyed brunette with a stylishly layered, shoulder-length haircut and a reputation for an anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive attention to details—in the nicest possible way. The artistic and color-coordinated ambience of this hospital, in addition to the no-expense-spared health care, was all about this woman. This facility was her baby and Hope knew she was as protective of it as any mother lion.
    “Hi,” she said from the office doorway.
    Val glanced up from the paperwork on her desk and looked over the reading glasses on her nose. “Hope. Come in. Have a seat.”
    “Thanks.”
    She sat in one of the green tweed chairs in front ofthe desk. The pale gold walls held pictures of seascapes and flowers. Family photos of her husband, two adult children—a boy and girl—were prominently displayed beside the computer monitor and coffee mug.
    Hope had interviewed with the other two campus presidents and Val before accepting this temporary position. The woman had a friendly warmth that made her approachable, a positive quality in an administrator. She’d canceled their last two scheduled meetings due to building permit and certification issues.
    “How are you holding up?” Hope asked, knowing her boss put in fourteen-hour-plus days, like so many of them were doing to open on schedule.
    “Hanging in there.” Val removed her glasses. “How are you doing?”
    Hope wondered for half a second if the emphasis and nuance in her tone meant that she’d heard a rumor about her being with Jake. There was a reason every soap opera on TV had a hospital in it. Probably she was just hyper-sensitive because the guilt of what she’d done was heavy on her heart.
    “By that I’m guessing you’re asking whether or not I have hearing loss from the fire alarms going off constantly?”
    “Oh,” Val said wryly. “I was hoping you hadn’t heard that.”
    Hope laughed. “Just a guess, but that high-pitched shrieky sound is kind of designed to get your attention.”
    “Lord knows it’s taken a lot of mine,” the other woman said ruefully. “It seems that the manufacturer put in cheap smoke dampers that won’t close.”
    “Not my area of expertise,” Hope said. “But by definition aren’t they supposed to shut and contain smoke in the event of fire?”
    “Yeah. The whole system starts with the alarm whichtriggers the dampers. Then the fire doors close automatically and the sprinklers go on.”
    “The domino effect,” Hope said.
    “Exactly. But if the damn dampers don’t close, we can’t pass the fire inspection and the fire marshal won’t give us the go-ahead to accept patients. We had to get a special dispensation for that dignitary open house the week before last.”
    Hope remembered it well and not because of the dignitaries. It was the night Jake had kissed her for the first time. If the alarms weren’t functioning properly, that would explain why the heat they’d generated hadn’t triggered the high-pitched shrieky noise.
    Maybe if the sprinklers had soaked them that first time, she’d have avoided an even bigger mistake. The man was a two-timing cheater. So not her type. So not noble like her husband. And not even thinking the worst of Jake could get him out of her mind.
    That made a mockery of the agreement to make their association all about the work, because even in this meeting thoughts of him had crept in. What were they talking about? Oh, right. Fire.
    “So is the system fixed?” she asked Val.
    “It is. After much swearing and gnashing of teeth,” the woman confirmed. “You’d think we could just replace the dampers, but nothing is ever that easy. Doing that would require ripping out the ceilings.”
    “Yikes.”
    “No kidding. So, we had to change the motors. And that did