Free Crash: A Bad Boy MMA Romance by Haylee Delane

The shame swirled in my gut, and I almost felt like I’d puke again. I just had to make it through my shift. Then I could go home and sleep and maybe I could think more clearly when I woke up.
    I’d be stuck in the house with my mother and Don, and there was nowhere I could go to escape. Now Crash, the father of my bastard child, would be a part of my life as well.
    My break was definitely over, and I hurried to where my attending physician was doing rounds with the rest of my resident class.
    She looked up at me with cold concern in her eyes.
    “Late again, Dr. Kelly? Are you planning to make it a habit? Dying people don’t work around your schedule.”
    “No. Of course not. I’ve been mildly ill. It’s nothing. Something I ate.”
    “Let’s not let that happen again.”
    The rest of my class looked up at me. Some of them were smirking. I’d dominated in school. Now that we were graduates, no longer interns but real doctors, I was falling behind.
    Everything I’d ever worked for had been for this moment in time. Now I was failing. Why? Because of a stupid drunken mistake I’d made in Brazil, on a vacation I never wanted to take in the first place.
    We did our rounds, working with the attending in the ER. A bus accident came in and the ER became controlled chaos with blood and bones everywhere.
    I helped stabilize a man who had a puncture wound in his chest, through his lung. He’d need surgery as soon as possible, but the operating rooms were all full.
    Once he was stabilized, I sat with him, manually pumping air into his lungs so they wouldn’t collapse.
    I looked at his battered face. He looked how I felt. After twenty minutes of manually pumping his lungs, the nurses carted him off to the operating room.
    The ER had settled down by then. We’d lost a man in the next stall over. I’d never lost a patient. Not yet. And I was glad I hadn’t been working on him.
    The way my emotions were raging, I might have broken down in tears. The attending physician was already on my ass. The last thing I needed was to appear weak and incompetent in the middle of an emergency.
    Toward the end of my shift, the chief of surgery came through the ER and pulled me aside.
    “I’ve read your status reports lately, Dr. Kelly. I have to say, I was disappointed. Is there something going on that I should know about?”
    Ever since I’d met Dr. Wells, he’d been a combination of teacher, mentor, and father figure.
    He rubbed his graying black beard, his dark brown eyes scrutinizing my every facial expression. As one of the few African-American doctors in my class, it seemed the other black doctors either took me under their wing with tenderness or dissected me with hostility.
    “It’s nothing,” I lied.
    “I’ve known your mother a long time. I know she’s getting remarried. I can understand why that might throw you off.”
    “Yeah. It’s weird. She’s been single for so long. I thought it would be that way forever.”
    “I’m rooting for you, Kelly, but you’re going to have to pick up the slack. You can’t be late for rounds. Understand?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Good,” he said, patting my shoulder. “Now, get back to work.” He gave me a grin, showing his straight white teeth.
    I smiled weakly back at him and halfheartedly laughed.
    The rest of my shift went by without a hitch. We delivered a baby in the ER because the little guy couldn’t wait for an obstetric room to be born.
    Everyone cheered at the new life, happy that mother and baby were doing well. My shift ended in the middle of the night. I could either sleep at the hospital to be back at noon the next day, or I could drive over to Don’s house and sleep in that insanely comfortable bed.
    I couldn’t even think about the fact that I was pregnant. I just pushed it right out of my mind. I wanted to avoid all of it. I wanted to avoid facing my mom and Don. But the lure of the comfy bed over the lumpy cot in the residents’ quarters was too