Dr. Finch (Healing Hands Book 4): A Steamy Workplace Romance Read online

  Dr. Finch

  Healing Hands Book 4

  Vanessa James

  Contents

  1. Copyright

  2. Get Free Books!

  3. Introduction

  4. Chapter 1: Dr. Finch

  5. Chapter 2: Dr. Walters

  6. Chapter 3: Dr Finch

  7. Chapter 4: Dr. Walters

  8. Chapter 5: Dr. Finch

  9. Chapter 6: Dr. Walters

  10. Chapter 7: Dr. Finch

  11. Chapter 8: Dr. Walters

  12. Chapter 9: Dr. Finch

  13. Chapter 10: Dr. Finch

  14. Reviews

  15. Dr Rock: Chapter 1

  16. Dr Rock: Chapter 2

  17. About Vanessa James

  Copyright

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Laura Eydmann

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously . Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Introduction

  She’s a doctor like no other – but can she heal his scars?

  Brought together by a seminar for veterans who served in Afghanistan, the no-nonsense Dr. Finch and gorgeous Dr. Francine Walters hit it off immediately. Linked by their war-torn past and eager to get a fresh start at a hospital in the quiet village of Mortown, the pair soon become close friends.

  Francine can’t hide her attraction from Dr. Finch. He’s exactly the man she’s always wanted. Their friendship quickly turns to a steamy office romance, hidden in the halls of their small hospital. But every time she tries to take things further, he shuts her down. The ghosts of past relationships haunt him, freezing his heart and keeping him from moving on.

  With sexual tension rising by the day and every attempt made by Francine to in him over failing, she begins to wonder if she’ll ever heal his emotional wounds. Can Francine thaw this damaged doctor’s heart? Or will his demons stop him from ever loving again?

  If you’re in need of a riveting, steamy HEA love story with plenty of passion and drama, then you’ll love Dr. Finch. Kick back and start reading, because this romance is only just getting started.

  Chapter 1: Dr. Finch

  I stared through the window in my office at the snow-capped mountains on the horizon, marvelling for the umpteenth time at how the peaks retained their powdery whiteness even when winter was long gone. It was true that Mortown had a beautiful landscape and I was enjoying it more with each passing day. I had spent less than three weeks in this town and, so far, I hadn’t regretted my decision. The experience had been wonderful so far.

  I stepped away from the window and returned to the black swivel chair behind my desk in the small office, which was next to the ones occupied by Francine, my friend and colleague, and Dr. Faye, the specialist locum doctor who usually came around twice in a week for special cases. My rear end settled on the smooth leather of the chair as I leaned forward, placing my elbows on the surface of the desk. I had spent hours walking round wards, attending to patients, checking test results and giving instructions to the nurses. It was everything I used to do back when I was still serving as a doctor in the suburbs of California before I joined the military.

  Thinking about my time as a military doctor during the War in Afghanistan threatened to bring back memories of the dark times I had faced in Kandahar and Sirkankel. I quickly pushed those thoughts out of my mind and grabbed a journal from the corner of my desk and began to flip through it. I didn’t want to remember any more of my Afghanistan experience. It was too grim, too grisly.

  I realized I was thumbing through the pages of the brightly colored journal without really paying attention to the words in front of me. I soon tossed it aside and reached for my laptop. It would make sense to spend this spare time studying the test results that had come in for Lauren, an elderly pneumonia patient that I was treating on the outskirts of the town. With a sigh, I opened the laptop and turned it on. As the machine came to life, I wondered how much longer I had to stick around for Francine. She was later than usual returning from her ward rounds. Maybe she had quite a lot to attend to today.

  Waiting to talk to each other after rounds had become a kind of ritual since we both came here. We would sit in this office and just chat, sometimes it could be things related to our field, but mostly we just talked about random things in our lives. It was not the content of our conversations that really mattered, but the fact that we maintained our friendship, which had existed long before we came to this town. We had met at a seminar for veterans when she had sat beside me. It has been months since then, but I still remembered the slight smile on her pretty face as she listened to the keynote speaker.

  We had got talking about our experiences and I learned that she had worked with troops who were stationed in a town not far from where I was. We had become firm friends since then. When she put in an application to work in Mortown Hospital some weeks after the seminar, she let me know and I did the same.

  The door of the office swung open and Francine walked in with a stethoscope hung around her neck and a small blue file tucked under her arm. She looked tired, but her face lit up when she saw me sitting there.

  “Hey Gilbert,” she said, walking over to my desk.

  “Hi Francine. Are you OK? You look really tired.”

  “You bet I am,” she said. “I used to think we had it tough in Afghanistan. Here is just as bad, if not worse.”

  I understood that. This was a small town, but we had an enormous amount of patients on a daily basis. I suppose that was because this town, with its art galleries, white-peaked mountains and museums, was a veritable tourist attraction. People came from neighboring towns and nearby cities to unwind in the tranquility of Mortown. Since there was no other hospital around, this hospital was the only one that served both the locals and the tourists. In terms of the stress we had to go through, what we faced here was indeed comparable to what we had experienced during those frenzied times in the War in Afghanistan.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said.

  Francine dropped the file on my desk and leant on the surface while remaining standing. I could see that she was weary to the core, but ours was a profession that taught you to soldier on, to keep working even when your body was screaming for you to take a break. A moment’s hesitation could prove to be the difference in the safety or mortality of a patient.

  After a moment, she walked away from my desk and headed towards the window where I had been watching the mountains just before she came in. My eyes strayed over her shapely body and down to her round hips before I looked away.

  “You are off soon, right?” she asked, after a moment of silence.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  She turned away from the window and sat down in the chair across from my desk. Her hands were making circular motions on the surface of the desk as she sat there without talking.

  “You look li
ke you need a break too,” I said. “Why not catch some rest and tell the head nurse to call you if something happens?”

  “I will do that eventually,” she said. “I will stay here for now though.”

  I nodded in response. Francine wasn’t the kind of person you could convince to do what she didn’t really want to do. She would put up all manners of defense to justify why things had to be done the way she wanted. The good thing, though, was that she was almost always right with her decisions.

  Our conversation today was struggling to get going. Francine was normally the one who talked more, but now that she had expended more energy than usual at work, she was too tired to speak in the rapid-fire manner that I had grown used to. I wished I could convince her to take a rest, but I knew she wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t ready.

  “Do you get tired of this place sometimes?” she asked hesitantly as she continued to move her fingers on the desk’s surface.

  “The workload is a lot, I admit, but this place is beautiful, and I am starting to get more familiar with the people around here,” I told her. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “We have only been here three weeks. It’s early days. I am sure I will adjust to this place as time goes by.”

  There was a shrill ring of the telephone from next door. That was Francine’s office.

  “See, I told you I can’t leave just yet,” Francine said, getting to her feet.

  “We’ll talk later then,” I said as I watched her grab the file she had dropped on the table and start towards the door of my office.

  “Yeah, bye, Gilbert.”

  And she was gone. I would have liked to suggest that she sat back and let me handle the case that had called her away, but the Francine I knew would not allow that. I rubbed my forehead gently as I wondered what to do for the rest of the evening after the two patients I had to check on. Maybe I would just wander around town and visit another art gallery. There were so many of them around Corbin Street. I would find one I hadn’t visited before and spend the evening there.

  With this thought, I began to clear my desk, getting ready to leave the hospital. Francine was too busy for us to have a nice chat today. After I had arranged things on my desk the way I liked, I went over to the window and closed the blinds. Due to the nature of my work, I could still end up back here, all it would take was one call from the nurses and I would come hurrying back.

  I locked the door of my office and slipped the key into my pocket. A man with a small girl resting her head against his chest greeted me as he walked past on the way to Francine’s office. The man’s face looked really familiar, but I couldn’t identify exactly who he was. It was easy to lose track of names and faces when you encountered so many every day. Slipping my hands in the pocket of my pants, I began to walk towards the entrance of the hospital. My footsteps were rather brisk. I was keen to get home in good time so I could squeeze some fun out of the evening, just in case I had to come back here.

  I didn’t get to the art gallery. The desire to step out of my cottage and drive around town had left me by the time I got home. It turned out that I was more tired than I had thought. The only thing I could do when I got home was heat up my soup on the stove and fill my aching belly with food. After that, I sat in a comfortable chair, listening to the quick whirring of the ceiling fan and the slow music playing from my speakers. I would have probably watched a movie or tuned into a sports show but the TV was faulty and I hadn’t found someone to fix it yet. I had visited the house of a man called Connor who I had been told fixed electronics, but he hadn’t been there.

  “He’s gone to Quarrez,” the buxom woman I met at his house said. I guessed she was his mother.

  “When will he be back?” I had asked.

  “In a week.”

  It had only been three days since I went there so I had a few more days without television, unless I could find someone else.

  So, I was sat in the small living room of my cottage, thinking about nothing in particular. My thoughts weren’t directly centered on anything and I liked it that way. I had a feeling that I would get a call from the hospital, telling me to report for an emergency. I wasn’t sure why I felt that way, but after years of being the man who was called often upon when such things happened, I had become used to it.

  I stifled a yawn as I thought of the boredom that would dominate my evening if I didn’t fight my reluctance to go out. Maybe I should just grab a shirt and walk around the neighborhood. That would be a lot easier to do than jumping in the car and driving all the way to Corbin Street. It was rather surprising to me that I was finding it so hard to go to the art gallery, given the enthusiasm that I had felt at work. I couldn’t lay a finger on what exactly had changed.

  Feeling a desire to achieve a measure of victory over myself, I picked up a short-sleeved dark shirt and slipped it on. I would take a walk around my neighborhood. I walked into my room to grab a comb and gently ran it through my hair. As I combed my hair, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Dark brown eyes, a square jaw and a clean-shaven face stared back at me.

  My eyes roved to the tiny line on my forehead. It was so small that people hardly ever noticed it. It was from a cut that I had gotten during an explosion close to one of the little tents that we had used to take care of the injured soldiers in Afghanistan. I remembered that I had been working with two combat medics, they were young but experienced at attending to injuries on the front. They were trained to provide relief to our lads when they were injured before they were transported via chopper to the temporary hospitals in Kandahar.

  I was working in the hospital before I decided to get close to where the danger was and help more of our soldiers to survive their injuries. Even with the experience of the combat medics, they weren’t as used to saving lives as us doctors. I had spoken to the captain of the troop and he had agreed that I could work with the combat medics. Together, we would patch up men and administer primary treatment before sending over the more serious cases to the temporary hospital. There were some cases that I handled by myself inside that small tent with the continuous cracking of gunshots sounding in the background. I could hear the cries of injured men and the crashing of bodies as they fell to the ground …

  That’s enough, I thought. I was already breathing hard from the little exploration of that memory. It was never easy for me to think about my time in Afghanistan, to reminisce on the fiery explosions, on the sights of flesh being ripped into pieces. I could only go down memory lane when I spoke to Francine. With her, I could confront the demons that threatened to make me lose my mind if I lingered on those dark thoughts for too long.

  Francine.

  I smiled as her face swam into my mind. She was a beautiful soul whom I enjoyed talking to a lot, and I was sure she enjoyed my company as much as I did hers. I could say that my experience in this town had been much better because she was here. But we rarely ever hung out outside work. There was always a lot of work to attend to meaning that there was a limited time for oneself, especially for Francine as she hadn’t settled in quite as well as I had. But the little time we had spent talking in our offices was always refreshing and immensely enjoyable. Maybe with time, we would both get more used to the stress of working around here and be able to see more of each other outside the hospital.

  I dropped the comb with a sigh and took one last glance at my reflection in the mirror. It was remarkable how much my face hadn’t changed since my college days. Perhaps that was something I had inherited from my dad. He never seemed to change facially for as long as he and mom were together. The image I had of him was a clean-shaven face with salt and pepper hair. It was the way he had looked during my childhood, and his face didn’t seem to have changed at all by the time I started my senior year in high school, around the time mom caught him with Miss Morgan from his office. Of course, nobody had told me that directly. I had heard them arguing in the bedroom and worked it out.

  “I should get going now,” I
muttered. The thoughts that were filtering into my head were not exactly what I would call happy. I should get out on the street and enjoy the cool evening breeze, try to see a world different from what the small interior of my cottage offered.

  I walked out of the bedroom and went over to switch off the speakers. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes past six. There would be enough people and things to see along the street as people returned from work. I locked the front door and turned away from the cottage, seeing the official car that the hospital had given to me parked in front of the house. I stuck my hands in my pocket, making sure I had my phone, as I walked away from the front door.

  I looked over at my neighbor’s compound and saw that it looked deserted, just as it had since my first day here. I remembered that no one from that house had come to welcome me to the town when I arrived. Either the house wasn’t occupied or the people living there were extremely reclusive.

  I began to walk down the sidewalk that led towards the patch of grass where local young men gathered to play soccer. I hadn’t left home with anywhere specific in mind, but now that I was going in that direction, it would make sense to go over there and watch the lads play. I always enjoyed seeing the boys running around, the setting sun glinting on their skin …

  The ring of my phone from within my pocket cut into my musing, and I quickly grabbed it. In my head, I wondered who it could be. It might be Francine or maybe it was a call from the hospital. A glance at the screen showed that it was the latter. I heaved a sigh, remembering my predilection that I would return to the clinic.