Free NYC Angels: Tempting Nurse Scarlet by Wendy S. Marcus

pointed. “There she is.”
    Through the half glass outer wall he saw Scarlet sitting in a rocker beside Joey’s incubator, feeding her from a special bottle, staring down at the tiny baby girl with a loving smile, looking very much like a mother caring for her own newborn. He walked to the doorway and cleared his throat to get her attention.
    She looked up guiltily.
    “How’s she doing?” he whispered.
    “Still not taking the bottle, but we keep trying.” She lifted Joey to her shoulder and rubbed her back.
    “Any news on her family?”
    “No,” Scarlet answered. “Are you here about Joey or did something else bring you up?”
    “I came to get Jessie and she said you asked her to watch Nikki.”
    “Shoot.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I lost track of time.”
    “Erica Cole asked me to tell you she’s here.”
    Scarlet stood.
    “I’ll take over,” the nurse offered.
    “Thank you.” She handed Joey into the other nurse’s care. “I changed one wet diaper. She’s taken next to nothing from the bottle.” Scarlet removed a disposable gown, balled it up, and pushed it into a waste bin.
    “I have a couple in crisis,” Scarlet shared quietly as she exited the room. “Erica Cole is a member of a group I formed for moms of NICU graduates. There are about fifty of them who are willing to come in with their children to talk to new parents who are having difficulty adjusting to the NICU and bonding with their babies.” She looked up at him. “It gives new parents whose infants are struggling to survive a little hope. Sometimes it makes all the difference.”
    “Yes it does,” he said from experience. Because Scarlethad given him that little hope that’d made all the difference with Jessie. She was a truly extraordinary woman.
    He stood at the desk and watched her through the glass of a small private room as she spoke with a couple. Although he couldn’t hear her words, her small smile conveyed understanding and compassion, her gentle touch conveyed support and caring. The couple watched her as she spoke, trust evident in their eyes. The woman started to cry and Scarlet took her into her arms and hugged her while the man turned his head as if trying to hide his emotions.
    “Our Scarlet is something special,” Linda said, coming to stand beside him. With such a big unit, did she have nothing better to do than hover?
    “Yes she is,” Lewis said, not taking his eyes off of Scarlet as she handed the woman a box of tissues and led her out of the room.
    “She deserves a good man who will appreciate all she has to offer and treat her right.”
    Linda’s tone implied a better man than him.
    “No argument there.”
    But after eighteen years of riding the manic-depressive, passive-aggressive maternal roller coaster of emotions, Lewis had used up his lifetime supply of energy earmarked for understanding, appeasing, and striving to meet the ever-changing expectations of women. He preferred the ups of flirty banter, new acquaintances, and satisfying sex to the downs of compromise, arguments, and frustrating disappointments inherent in long term relationships.
    After a childhood spent catering to the whims of a mentally ill mother, Lewis would not regress to allowinganother woman any degree of control over his life. Ever.
    He was his own man. He did what he wanted when he wanted and didn’t have to get approval from or justify his actions to anyone. At least that’d been his pre-Jessie modus operandi.
    Now the waters of his life had gotten unrecognizably muddy.
    He couldn’t bring various women home night after night, not with an impressionable young daughter watching his every move. Most unsettling, with four days of freedom ahead, was the fact he seemed to have lost the anticipatory thrill of the chase, catch, and release. Random, meaningless hookups with generic, unmemorable women no longer appealed to him. But neither did monogamy or marriage. So where did that leave him?
    Lewis left the