The Family You Make (Sunrise Cove #1)(55)

Which settled it.

She’d lost her mind.

She hustled through her morning routine. Then she and Charlotte hit up the diner for breakfast before their shifts. The cook came out and slapped a twenty into Charlotte’s waiting palm before vanishing back into the kitchen.

“He lost a bet,” Charlotte said. “Last week he sliced his hand open when I was here.”

“Wait. You come here without me?”

“No, when you’re busy, I stay at home, frozen in time until you come home.”

Jane rolled her eyes and Charlotte smiled. “Jealous. Cute. Anyway, he sliced his hand wide open. I wanted to stitch him up, but he insisted on using Super Glue because he’s got a needle phobia. I told him it was a terrible idea, but have you ever successfully talked a man out of a stupid idea? No, right? So he found some sort of construction glue and electric tape and told me to pick my poison. I told him that either would land him in the ER with an infection. We bet on it—his idea,” she said, raising her hands like she was innocent. “Not mine. So he Super Glued his hand.”

“And because you can’t help yourself, you took the bet knowing you’d win, and it got infected and he landed in the ER,” Jane guessed.

“Bingo. But don’t worry, I’m putting the twenty into his tip jar when we leave.”

Jane laughed. Charlotte couldn’t resist a good bet that she knew she could win, but she also couldn’t take advantage of anyone—she just wasn’t built that way. “You work in the OR. So how did you find out?”

Charlotte’s cheeks went red. Fascinating. Jane pointed at her. “You and Mateo have been talking.”

“No! Well, not about patients. I . . . um, happened to be with Mateo in the staff room when he was paged, and I might have gone with him to the ER, since I was having a slow night.”

“Mateo and Charlotte sitting in a tree,” Jane sang. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .”

Charlotte was head down on the table, ears flaming. “You’re a child.”

“Yep.” Jane stood. “I’ve gotta go and so do you.”

They walked out into the parking lot together. They’d gotten another foot of fresh powdery snow overnight.

“Stay safe,” Charlotte said.

“Always. And right back at you.”

It was a common refrain between them. Jane hit the road heading up to Starwood Peak urgent care and got caught behind a snowplow, which meant she made it to work with barely a minute to spare. She hit the job running and never slowed down.

Starwood was Jane’s least favorite of the five, mostly because it tended to draw the hotdoggers, the reckless, the worst of the weekend warriors—which meant her day was filled with knee, shoulder, and leg injuries. Plus, there was an ever-higher ratio of what she privately called the splat syndrome—when people who weren’t expert skiers or boarders attempted to ski the fresh powder off trail in the trees. Then went splat against those trees.

They could be horrifyingly serious injuries, which meant calling for the helicopter to get them airlifted to either Reno or Davis, depending on how many minutes they had to save them—a grim reality that wasn’t in the glorious, exciting promo ads for Lake Tahoe. The staff often reduced the tension by playing pranks on one another. Last week, Dr. Daniel Briggs, a known asshole to nurses far and wide, had decided he needed his own microwave because the nurses took up too much of their short lunch breaks heating up their food. And no underlings—nurses—were allowed to use his microwave.

For a few days, Jane and the others had debated on a way to prank him without getting caught. They came up with lots of plans, all discarded because Dr. Briggs had been known to get people fired for looking at him cross-eyed.

Charlotte had helped Jane come up with a brilliant plan. She’d changed his autocorrect settings in Outlook, so whenever he typed his title—something he did all day long, every time he entered patient info—his name autocorrected to Dr. Daniel Briggs, his eloquence, master of duck herding, and debater of microwave etiquette.

He’d not been able to point the finger at anyone, so Jane lived to prank another day. And better yet, Dr. Briggs wasn’t on today. But the clinic was unusually cold, and not just because people kept coming in from outside, where the temp hovered around twenty-eight degrees. There was something wrong with the heating system, so she was working in her scrubs with her down vest on top.

In the vest pocket sat the sugar plum fairy ornament. Every time the small flat box pressed up against her ribs, a mixed bag of emotions hit her. Emotions she wasn’t sure she could name even if she’d wanted to. She tried to go with angry, but somehow she was having trouble sticking with that.

On her break, she decided it was time to be a grown-up. So she sneaked into the supply closet—because nothing said grown-up more than that—and pulled out her phone to send a text.

JANE: Need to talk to you.

LEVI: Not that I’m easy, but when and where?

JANE: I get off at 6.

LEVI: Or you could wait for me to assist in the getting off . . .

JANE: Are you flirting with me?

LEVI: Depends on if you liked it.

LEVI: . . .

JANE: Okay, maybe I liked it a little. Leave me a text on where to find you. I’m going to go home and change first.

LEVI: Don’t change on my account. I like you just the way you are.