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

  Chapter 2: Dr. Walters

  I flicked a strand of my blond hair away from my face as I walked out of the ward. I had just attended to my last patient for the day, a small girl with jaundice, and I was now heading back to my office for a brief moment of rest before leaving the hospital. It had been a long, strenuous day at work, and I was glad that I was somewhat free for now.

  I headed back to my office, passing Gilbert’s office as I walked by. I smiled at the name tag on the door, possibly to direct patients who were not yet familiar with each doctor’s office as we were still new around here. Gilbert had done a better job of fitting in here than I had. He was more sociable with the people here and already knew more places in town. In the time we had known each other I had always known him to be an active man but it seemed that coming to this town had given him a different level of energy.

  By now, I was standing before the door of my own office, staring at the name tag that carried my name and thinking of my previous experiences. Unlike Gilbert, who had started out as a civilian doctor before completing a course so he could work in a military hospital during the war, I was a military doctor first. It was after the war that I got to experience working in a civilian hospital.

  I walked into my office and sat down, rubbing the throbbing side of my head. That is a clear sign of stress, I told myself. I didn’t want to start popping pills just for a headache, all I needed was some proper rest and I would be fine in no time. My fingers were slowly moving in a random pattern on the desk as I thought about taking a cold shower and tucking my tired body under the sheets. There was nothing I wanted more at that moment. I could not wait to drive home and …

  A sharp knock on the door cut into my stream of thought. In the moment that followed, one of the nurses entered my office. His scrubs settled perfectly against his muscular frame. I thought his name was Joe or something.

  “Doctor, there is a new patient in the ward,” he said as he entered the office.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I said, rousing myself and standing up.

  “A deep cut that needs to be stitched,” the male nurse replied. “The patient is male, in his sixties.”

  I followed the nurse out of my office and in the direction of the ward. As we passed the waiting area, one of the other nurses let me know that there was no point going to the ward because the patient had insisted on having a male doctor. She had already placed a call to Dr. Finch.

  “All right, that’s fine,” I said.

  I began to walk wearily back to my office. All I had to do now was grab my bag, lock my office and head home. With a bit of luck, I wouldn’t have to come here again today. I shook my head as I thought of poor Gilbert having to leave whatever he had been attending to so that he could come down here to treat the patient who only wanted a male doctor. I was no longer surprised by that request. There were still people like that in this town who for some reason thought that a female doctor was inferior to her male counterpart. It was utter bullshit, but some of these people were not willing to expand their small minds. I hoped Gilbert would get here in good time.

  The door of my office swung open when I turned the handle. I walked straight to the desk where my bag was and quickly picked it up. The throbbing sensation in my head had gone down a bit, maybe the short distance I had walked to the waiting room and back had helped. After a glance around the office to see if all was in place, I stepped out and began to walk towards the front door of the hospital. The passageway walls were decorated with happy, calming scenes that were meant to soothe the nerves of patients on their way to their doctor’s office.

  The tall, slim frame of Gilbert Finch darkened the threshold of the front door and then the light hit him and I could see him better. His long legs were clad in black pants and a black shirt was visible under his scrubs. His face was expressionless as it almost always was while he worked. It was hard to know what exactly he was thinking. You couldn’t tell if he was irritated that he had been called to come back to the hospital when I was still around, or if he was eager to get to the ward so he could treat his patient and hurry back. One had to rely on his body language, but his face was inscrutable as usual.

  I’d heard patients talking of his ability to deliver grim news with an empathetic face but the next moment he would be back to his bland, neutral face. When I teased him about it he would just smile thinly.

  “Fran, you look better than when I left,” he said when he reached me. “You should still catch some rest though.”

  “Alright, doc,” I said, laughing as he hurried towards the reception, probably to confirm which ward the patient was in.

  There were times when I wondered why Gilbert seemed a better fit for this town, why he had had an easier adjustment. I was raised in a town such as this, I had more of an experience of rural and suburban life. I didn’t go to a city until I turned eleven when I started high school.

  I stepped out of the hospital, moving away from that world of bright white lights, cheap disinfectant smell and the continuous hum of the air conditioners, and into the fading sunlight and encroaching dusk. I hurried over to my car, switched on the engine and drove off the hospital premises. I whistled to myself as I drove, thinking of the comfort that my bed would offer my aching body after such a long day at work. With my hands resting on the wheel, I thought about my warm dinner, a hot beverage and snuggling under the sheets. My mind soon strayed to the erotic. I thought about having a warm-bodied man with me under the sheets. How soothing that would be! I would writhe and curl my body around his, letting my body merge with his in passion …

  But there is no warm-bodied man to warm my bed now, I thought. It was better to push that thought out of my mind and just rest when I got home. Thinking about it, I realized that it had been quite some time since a man really warmed my bed. I wasn’t sure but I thought it had been about a year ago, and that was just casual sex, nothing serious or recurrent. It had actually been pretty bad. Matt, the handsome guy I had met on a night out with two of my friends back in the city, had cracked lewd jokes and talked dirty when we got slightly drunk. He had talked of being massive down there and I had been interested. It became clear that he had exaggerated, and he wasn’t even proficient with his tool.

  I drove around a bend, trying to force the thoughts about sex out of my mind. I didn’t want to get so turned on that I had to please myself when I got back home. It wouldn’t do any good focusing my thoughts on getting laid when there was no one around to explore those thoughts with. I remembered that in the first week of my arrival in this town, I had met Rich, a handsome, muscular man who worked as a supervisor in town. It had looked like we might get pretty close, but he had left town a few days after my arrival and I hadn’t heard from him since then.

  My house appeared in the distance as I took a final turn on the long, wide road that traversed the better parts of the town. I was eager to get home and get the rest that I richly deserved. I thought about Gilbert performing sutures on whatever part of the patient needed to be stitched. Maybe it was his groin region and that was the reason he was reluctant to allow a female doctor to attend to him.

  I parked my car with a little sigh. Now all that stood between me and the comfort I longed for was a few meters walk.

  I stepped out of the bathroom, slowly toweling the moisture off my body as I made for my bed. My time in the shower had been spent washing off dirt and soothing my nerves, as well as using my fingers to stimulate my clit. I hadn’t been able to resist the urge to touch myself a little. The desire to let off some sexual steam had descended on me as I lathered my skin with soap and enjoyed the warm water.

  I finished drying my skin and I hung the towel on the small hook on the wall. My eyes strayed to the bed and I sighed happily, knowing that now nothing would prevent me getting the long rest that I deserved after a demanding day at work. With a sigh, I lay on the bed and pulled the sheets over my body. I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to swoop in on me. It didn't happen instantly, an
d my mind started to fill with different thoughts. I knew that if I allowed my mind to roam free and relax for a while, I would soon drift off.

  I wondered what Gilbert was doing now, maybe he was washing blood off his gloved hands after finishing stitching the patient up. In my mind, I could see his lean body bending over as he scrubbed. His face would probably still be devoid of expression, despite successfully helping a patient.

  Gilbert and I had become really close since we first met at the seminar held in Chicago for veterans. We had started talking when I sat next to him and I had been stunned by how remarkably easy he was to talk to, despite the way he set his face to look as if he didn't enjoy the things going on around him.

  Now that we were both working in Mortown, we had become a bit closer, even though we weren't always free at the same time. We would chat with each other in between tasks and also stick around for a while before we left the hospital. We would sit in my office or his and talk about whatever came to mind. At times, Gilbert just listened to me talk about my experience in Kandahar and the rest of my life. He would listen with rapt attention, concentrating on me as if nothing else mattered in the whole wide world. Having his warm brown eyes on me always spurred me to talk more, to open my heart to him.

  Sometimes he spoke about himself and I would marvel at how his eyes twinkled when he spoke of the early years of his life, which he had spent sheltered to the fullest by his loving parents. In the same way, his face would visibly cloud over when he spoke about his experience in Sirkankel. I could clearly see that those memories were hard for him to recount, but he would still talk about them. I knew first-hand about the gory things he had seen and the terrible things he had experienced.

  I stirred around in my bed, wondering why I was thinking so intensely about Gilbert. I could no longer deny to myself that I had been drawing close to him on a level that was more emotional than physical. With each passing day, I found our chats more comforting. There was a certain gladness I felt just from staring into his face. And on occasions, such as today, when we weren’t able to talk much due to the strain of work on our shoulders, it felt like there was a certain void that remained unfilled.

  "Are you crushing on Gilbert now?"

  It wasn't as mild as a crush. My feelings were becoming serious and I had to do something about it. I knew better than to attempt to explore a romantic relationship with him. He had been scarred by a previous relationship and was still hurting. He had told me how he had walked in on his girlfriend Shirley, who he had known since childhood, moaning as she rode a guy to seventh heaven. They hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.

  Gilbert had concluded by saying he didn’t think he could trust his heart to love again. His heart was now set in stone. There was no space for love in there anymore. I knew that already, so it would be sheer folly to expect him to change his mind for me. He saw me as nothing but a friend and that was all there was on the matter.

  I heaved a sigh, wondering if it was possible that I was wrong, and Gilbert saw me in a different light. There was no way I could tell that. He hadn’t said anything and, of course, he had a legendary passive face from which it was extremely difficult to tell what he was thinking. There was no telling what he thought. I thought it was reasonable to assume that he only saw me as a colleague and friend.

  Maybe it would be best if I stopped the blossoming friendship between us before it bit me on the ass. I knew Gilbert wasn’t the type of man who wore his emotions on his sleeve. Opening my heart up to him was just going to cause me heartbreak. It didn’t look like he was ever going to soften up. He had made it clear to me that he was broken beyond the point of loving anyone, that the moment he saw Shirley writhing on the body of another man, a part of him had died, never to be resurrected. There was no point in me spending time with him when I found him so attractive and datable when he was emotionally beyond my reach.

  That was the answer. I would start giving Dr. Gilbert lots of space, enough to make him catch the drift and understand that I was not interested in a friendship with him if there was no prospect of something bigger and better.

  I felt a little selfish as I thought about this. Was it impossible to consider a friendship without any strings attached? I knew that there was probably a way to keep things platonic between us, but with the way things were going, I was beginning to fall for him and I didn’t think I should do that when I knew that he was yet to overcome the demons of his past relationships.

  By now, my hand had snaked down between my thighs. I had moved it there unconsciously. Perhaps it was my lingering thoughts about Gilbert occupying my mind that had given me a need to touch myself and trigger a fit of pleasure. I parted my legs slightly as my forefinger stroked my clitoris. My other hand curled around my boob and I squeezed gently.

  A moan escaped my lips as the pleasure began to build up. I rubbed my clit in a circular motion, rocking my hips in tandem to my probing finger. I squeezed my breast harder, pinching the nipple between thumb and finger, causing my lips to part wider and louder moans to slip from my mouth. I was edging closer to the release I sought with each passing second and it was all I wanted.

  An image of Gilbert flickered into my mind. I imagined him taking off his scrubs and dropping them on the floor of my room. His lean upper body was bare before my eyes. I stared at his well-formed chest on which his nipples stood out. Images of me pushing my body against his filled my mind, making me even hotter and wetter down between my legs.

  My fingers continued twirling around my clit as I felt waves after waves of pleasure running through my body. Desperate to experience more, I began to run my free fingers up and down the length of my folds, spreading my wetness around the whole area.

  I slipped a finger in and began to probe in the direction of the glorious spot that was capable of sending me to the clouds of pleasure that I was inching towards. One finger became two, then three while my thumb continued to stimulate my clit. My body was trembling from the intense pleasure. I could feel myself gravitating towards the kind of bliss that could not be described by mere words. My eyes clamped shut and I began to see stars. My fingers probed deeper into my core, hitting my G-spot after several strokes.

  My world shook right to the foundation as I achieved orgasm. It was so pleasurable that I began to shudder uncontrollably. Then my whole body went limp and, at last, I began to drift towards sleep.

  Chapter 3: Dr Finch

  I stood at the bedside of Carl, the young lad who had hurt his eyes in a rough game with his brothers. I had just examined his eyes and seen that they were getting less swollen thanks to the drugs I had instructed the nurses to administer to him for the past few hours. Carl was such a good sport about his injury. He bore the pain with more maturity than I had expected from a boy of his age. After asking him questions about how much pain he felt and how well he could see, I was able to determine the level of progress we were making.

  My examination of Carl was soon complete, and I moved on to the next bed, who was my final patient for this round. Jeremy had been bitten by a snake and the nurses had been treating him with anti-venom.

  “How are you, Jeremy?” I asked, running my eyes over his bandaged leg.

  “I’m good, doc,” the man replied with a half-smile. “I feel a lot better than yesterday. It felt like I was going to die. Never felt such pain before.”

  I knew how painful a snake’s bite could be, having experienced one when we had to crawl between bushes at night after our troops lost ground in a short skirmish. A copper-colored desert racer had snapped at my thigh and I had felt the pain all the way up in my brain as its teeth sank in my flesh. It was a good job that the snake was not clinically venomous.

  “I’m glad you feel better now,” I said to him. “Have you tried putting any weight on the leg?”

  “Yes, I can feel the strength returning to the leg. I tried to stand this morning and the pain wasn’t as bad.”

  “Great,” I said. “We’ll discharge you soon. You’ll have
the bandage on for quite some time but you will be fine with the drugs and a good rest.”

  “Can’t wait to see the boys at the baseball green this evening,” Jeremy said before collapsing back onto his bed. “Thanks doc.”

  I spent a few more minutes with him, talking about which activities to avoid after we discharged him before I handed over to the nurse nearby to continue from where I had stopped. I walked away from the ward, from the pervasive smell of antiseptic used to clean the floor and everything else around here. I fiddled with my stethoscope which hung over my neck as I listened to the faint sound of my footsteps on the tiled floor. There were nurses moving about, attending to patients in each ward. The hospital was full of activity at this hour.

  I walked briskly in the direction of my office. I had completed my round of the ward and it was time to go home. Maybe there would be another call from the nurses when I left again today, but Francine was on duty for now and that should be enough to prevent a call from the hospital unless there was another patient who didn’t want a female doctor to handle his privates.

  I reached the waiting area and saw Francine standing next to Karen, one of the nurses. It didn’t look like they were talking about anything work-related, but I wasn’t sure. I waved to Francine as I headed to my office and she replied with a brief nod. That wasn’t the first time I had seen Francine chatting to Karen, and I was surprised by the sudden friendliness that had sprung up between the two because Francine had never really warmed up to the other staff the way I had. It was refreshing to see her starting to get on with her co-workers.

  I got to my office and pushed open the door, inhaling the fragrance of the air freshener that I had hung in a corner of the office. I didn’t want that anti-septic smell to reign in here as well. I sat in my office chair and reclined back slightly. This was the first time I had had a chance to sit comfortably in God knows how many hours. I was glad that I was done with the day’s job, for now at least.