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Chapter Three

“Do you haverocks for brains?” Patrick snaps, rubbing the ache at his temples.

The other nurse at the station tenses up, but the one he’s talking to just raises a brow.

“Doyouhave an attorney at the ready to handle the harassment case I’ll slap on you if you keep talking to me like that?” Varun Choudry crosses his arms over the front of his scrubs. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with you.”

“That’s the truth.” And despite Patrick’s best efforts, he hasn’t managed to fix that problem yet. He looks at the computer again, scanning the patient’s chart. “I know you’re not stupid, but you—”

“Careful,” Varun purrs. “That almost sounds like flirting.”

“Ha! As if.”

He’s come to know Varun well since the night the young, handsome nurse hit on him in the bar of the Tallgrass hotel. Luckily, Will likes him too, and once tried to set Varun up with an employee of Good Works, but Varun wasn’t interested.

Varun keeps his brow arched. “Look, I told you. When I came in, five hundred milligrams of Keppra was charted. I can’t give her more if it’s on the chart. And it’son the chart.”

“But it’s notin her body. This chart is a lie!”

Varun sighs. “Then order more and I’ll give it to her, but I can’t give her more on my own authority if it’s charted that she’s received her dose. You know this.”

“And youknowshe didn’t receive it.”

Varun scowls at him.

Patrick scowls back. “Fine. Give a STAT one-time dose of oral five hundred milligrams Keppra. And grab some urine beforehand and send it to the labs to test. I want to confirm what I already know. Then you can chart it all.”

“Will do.” Varun bats his pretty eyes. “Enter the order and we’re a go, Dr. McFlirty.”

The brunette ponytailed nurse who’s clacking away on the other computer gasps slightly and turns red. Patrick can just imagine all the ways she’ll misrepresent this interaction with Varun to the hospital administration given half the chance.

Patrick’s one of the only doctors who has the nurses’ backs when salary disputes come up in the boardroom, but they don’t know that. So this one’s probably planning to gab to anyone upstairs who will listen about his supposedly inappropriate behavior with a coworker.

“Oh, can it,” he says to her irritably, holding up his left hand. “I’m a married man. Go be a stick-in-the-mud in room 8-B. She needs her bedpan changed.”

“Yes, Dr. McCloud.” The nurse hustles off, her cheeks still stained red.

“Don’t be a jerk to Lizzy.”

“I’ll be a jerk to whomever I want.”

“Enter the order, Dr. McCloud,” Varun says again, rolling his eyes. “I thought there was no time to waste.”

“I’m a brain surgeon not a babysitter. You enter the order.”

Varun cocks his hip. “As you well know, new hospital policy saysyouhave to enter the order, not me.”

“Fine.” Patrick grumbles under his breath about ridiculous new hospital policies that just waste his time and jerk nurses who’re going to get him written up for sexual harassment, when all he wants to do is saw into someone’s head and fix their brains. “When you’re fired for being a pain in my butt, don’t come whining to me.”

“I’m shaking in my boots.” Varun laughs.

“You should be.”

“Why would you get me fired when you’re always trying to convince me to come aboard full time and give up my travel contract?”

Patrick punches the buttons on the keyboard. “You’ve been here for years. Give up the ruse that you’re still a travel nurse.”

“Not until the hospital gives a livable salary. Once they stop paying their staff nurses less than those on travel contracts, I’ll give it some thought.”