Outside The Lines Read Free

straightforward, actually. He could end his shift with a lot worse. “A burn like that’s got to hurt. Let’s get this lady taken care of.”
    “Thanks, Dr. Fisher. ” The nurse was already a blur as she moved in the opposite direction toward the triage desk. “She’s in curtain three.”
    Blake gathered up a tired breath and tugged a hand through his hair, even though he’d given up on appearances about ten hours ago. Or maybe that had been ten weeks, because really, this might be the first twenty-nine-year-old woman he’d laid eyes on in…how long?
    But come on. Between diving headfirst into a new ER and dealing with all the reasons he’d left New York City in the first place, he’d barely had time to unpack, let alone think about a member of the opposite sex.
    Except now…he was thinking about it. How long had it been since he’d had sheet-ripping, toe-curling, stay-up-all-night-just-to-do-it-again-in-the-morning sex with someone? Someone he wanted to be with not just below the belt, but above the neck, too?
    Eight years, buddy. It’s been eight. Long. Years.
    “Okay. Second-degree burn,” Blake murmured, wrenching his thoughts back to reality. He might not have had a relationship with anyone in…well, a while, but he hadn’t lived like a monk in New York, either. He’d dated a handful of women, and slept with a handful more. There were just more important things on his plate right now. His personal life— okay, lack of a personal life— would have to wait.
    And his thoughts of eight y ears ago would have to go back in the vault.
    Blake propped the electronic chart over his forearm, clicking it to life as he snuffed out any thoughts that didn’t involve the upper layer of his next patient’s epidermis. Her health history looked good, and the injury sounded textbook, albeit painful, so this really should be a slam dunk.
    “Hello? Miss…” He pulled back the curtain, dropping his eyes to the top of the chart to locate the woman’s name. But a flash of copper-colored curls yanked his vision to the center of the room, a scissor-sharp burst of I’m not really seeing this freight-training through his chest. Tiny fragments trickled past his shock— the woman sitting beside his patient, wearing the concerned look of a friend, the overly-faded jeans hugging a pair of legs that were just as long as he remembered, the tiny silver pendant resting in the hollow of the woman’s throat— but none of it fit in the present tense.
    “Julianna?” Christ, he’d been so focused on the medical facts, he’d missed the name on the chart, right there in the first damned box. “What are you doing here?”
    Maybe he was mistaken, his eyes playing tricks on him in the face of exhaustion. The woman’s mouth, which Blake just realized was parted in a soft, red O of surprise, snapped shut as she unfolded her spine into a tough, indignant line, and nope. He took it back.
    It was definitely Jules.
    “ I could ask you the same thing,” she said, her throaty voice hitting him in the solar plexus as she pulled back against the mattress. “I thought you were gone. In the city.” Her aged-whiskey eyes were still wide with shock, but they flickered with a layer of tenacity that warned she was recalibrating, fast.
    For once , he was going to beat her to the punch. “I was. Work brought me here,” he said, modulating his words with a casual coolness despite the absolute ruckus going on beneath his sternum. Okay, so it had crossed his mind for a fleeting second when he’d first come back to Brentsville that she might still be around, but the city wasn’t exactly a map dot. Even on the off-chance she’d stayed, Blake certainly never thought he’d see her again.
    And yet here she sat, just as tough and brash and beautiful as ever.
    “Funny. Work brought me here, too.” Jules winced ever so slightly at the compress-swaddled arm the nurses had elevated over a stack of pillows at her side. “But it’s no big deal. It