Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(110)

She stopped in the doorway on her way out and turned to him. “I meant what I said about Trisha earlier, DJ. This isn’t just a job to her. I know she’s hard to understand sometimes. But she’s not what she seems to be. Do you know what I’m saying? She won’t let a patient down. She won’t let anyone down. It would kill her. She is the most dependable person I know. I just thought you should know that.”

He nodded. Had Trisha told her sisters what had happened at Naomi’s? The idea that Ashna and Nisha might know how he had behaved was more than a little embarrassing.

Something told him she hadn’t told her sisters. For all the uncertainty he was filled with right now, the only things he felt certain about seemed to have to do with her.

“Thank you,” he said and he must have looked really pathetic because she came back inside and pulled him into a hug.

TRISHA LOVED HER cousin like a sister. Truly, she did. But the kick of envy in her gut at seeing DJ holding Ashna made her want to fold over.

After ten hours of destroying a tumor lodged deeply into brain tissue, one cell at a time, she was bursting with adrenaline. Surgery never exhausted her. It wiped her mind clean of everything else but her patient, and that put her in a place she couldn’t describe with words. She felt hollowed out yet full. Like she carried everything, yet nothing weighed her down.

Now here she was, out of the OR, and everything she’d left outside it came crashing down on her—the way DJ felt about her, the fact that HRH had disowned her. Had that been real? A wave of panic washed over her.

Looking at DJ, she knew she had made the right decision. The way everything inside her melted into a pool of wanting when she was near him had nothing to do with her decision to go ahead with the surgery. A man getting to keep the only family he had—that had everything to do with it. It didn’t matter who the man was. This was why she did what she did. This is what she had wanted with a singular obsession all her life. HRH had taught her too well. If he’d lost sight of what was important because his ambitions were under threat, that wasn’t Trisha’s problem.

The excitement of telling DJ that the surgery had been a success and that his sister was stable had felt uncontainable moments ago. No, it still felt uncontainable. It wasn’t going to be ruined by how badly she wanted to hold him the way Ashna was doing right now. He deserved his peace wherever he got it. Sitting by yourself in a hospital with no idea if someone you loved would survive was not something she wished upon anyone.

She remembered sitting in the waiting room while Yash underwent surgery. Nisha’s tight grip on one hand and Ashna’s on the other was what had gotten her through it.

DJ looked up from Ashna’s shoulder. His eyes darkened with awareness, mixed in with a whole slew of other emotions she couldn’t name. He pulled away from Ashna and blasted Trisha with the desperate question in his eyes.

“We got the tumor—all of it,” she said, fighting hard to keep her voice professional. “Emma is stable.” It was hard forcing herself to not imagine scenarios where he’d suddenly realize he was in love with her and fly into her arms. “The next twenty-four hours are critical. But everything looks good.”

“That’s great!” her cousin said, beaming.

She smiled back, but she couldn’t look away from DJ’s eyes. There was such relief there that in that moment it was just the two of them in the room.

“Can I see her?” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.

“They’re setting her up in post-op. A nurse will come and get you when she’s ready. It will be a while before she wakes up, maybe even a day. I . . .” Ashna’s gaze on her suddenly made her feel naked. “I can come by later and fill you in on the details and answer questions.” Her voice sounded professional enough, but Ashi’s eyes were getting more and more knowing.

Then again, having a nurse call Ashna in the middle of surgery to tell her that DJ was by himself in the waiting room had been akin to confessing all her feelings for him anyway.

The idea of her family seeing how she felt about him was horrifying. There was no way she could bear their sympathy. So she had no idea what came over her when she reached out as though to take his hand, and then halfway through withdrew it because suddenly she didn’t want to touch him. Not with Ashna’s concerned eyes watching her as though she were a puppy hit by a car with no hope of recovery.

His hand hung midair as she turned around and hurried out of the room.

God, when would she stop being such a dimwit around him?

When she’d left the OR, she had felt powerful. Then she’d seen him and the sight had hit her like a full-body blow and now all she wanted was to attach herself to him like a leech.

She pictured him plucking off the leech and flicking it into the air. Turning down the empty corridor, she thumped her head against the wall, giving in to an urge that was becoming as habitual as not being able to keep her shit together when it came to DJ bloody Caine! A nurse scurried past, working hard to avoid eye contact. Maybe Trisha just needed to move away. To the moon, or maybe Mars. What was the holdup with colonizing planets anyway?

She pulled herself together, got some coffee, and without waiting to think about it stepped into Entoff’s office. Maybe she couldn’t move to Mars, but she could talk her boss into helping her get away for a while. There was a team of surgeons traveling to Africa this week to train the surgeons there on a new technology. Even if she had to beg, she was getting on that team.