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  Now Rick finally pulled his focus onto Boyd. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m her father, asshole. And you’re older than me.”

  He let out a harsh laugh. “Isn’t this the guy you said you’d found? Isn’t that why you were drunk that night? That’s what you told me. Now he’s, what, your fucking sidekick? Unbefuckinglievable.”

  Rick leaned in. “Dude, let me tell you something. I’m still trying to pay off the last of my fucking student loans, on top of my malpractice insurance premiums and my daily living expenses and alimony to my fucking ex-wife. I don’t know what fantasy land you’re living in, but I drive a ten-year-old car and live in a shitty apartment. I am not rich, and I do not want a fucking kid. She’s a goddamned nurse. She should have given me a condom if she wasn’t sure if the pill would work, or taken a Plan B pill the next day. I see this bullshit all the time, a nurse thinks she’s gonna snag herself a doctor, and—”

  Boyd hadn’t realized he’d started moving, to slide out of the booth and go after the guy, until he felt Ella’s hands clamp onto his left arm.

  “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please, don’t. He’s not worth it.”

  “I’m not worth it?” Rick laughed. “Honey, I can have any piece of pussy I want in my fucking bed every night. I sleep with nurses all the fucking time, and even hot little residents. Not my fault you weren’t smart enough to go to medical school.”

  Boyd tried to move again, but Ella’s grip tightened on his arm. “Listen, you little prick,” Boyd said. “You have a goddamned responsibility.”

  Rick slid out of the booth and stood there with a smirk on his face. “Hey, I’m offering to go halves on an abortion. She wants to keep it? That’s all on her. We’re done here.” He jabbed a finger in her direction. “You try to cause me any trouble in the hospital and I’ll have my buddies swear on a stack of Bibles in front of HR that you’re a fucking slut, see if I don’t.”

  He turned and stormed out of the coffeeshop.

  Ella softly cried next to Boyd. “Told you. This was a waste of time and now he’ll try to ruin me at the hospital.”

  Boyd slid his cellphone out of his pocket, hit stop on the video camera, and smiled. “No, he won’t.”

  Her eyes widened. “What did you do?”

  He tapped the preview square and played the video back. Rick was clearly visible in the frame, and his words perfectly played, completely audible. “Not sure if this would be admissible in court, but your HR rep will probably find it very interesting. Let’s go talk to them.”

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “Pre-emptive strike. Right now. You need this noted in your files before he has time to get his ‘buddies’ together to get their stories straight. This way, once they try that shit, they’ll all drop his ass to save their own. He might be a doctor and older than me, but I’ve had experiencing managing a complex team for years at the county level. He’s a fucking amateur.”

  * * * *

  Ella looked stunned and Boyd didn’t blame her. They headed over to the hospital and she led him to the administrative wing. Lorena Calgary, the head of HR, was an older black woman who impassively listened as Boyd summed up the situation twenty minutes after their confrontation with Rick.

  Then he played her the video.

  Her lips pressed into a severe line when it finished. “Well, this is certainly an interesting turn of events.”

  “How so?” Boyd asked.

  “Because this is not the first time someone’s approached us about similar behavior. Unfortunately, in the other cases, it was always he said-she said, and we had no proof either way.”

  She leaned back in her chair and removed her glasses, laying them on her desk as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “And I didn’t tell you that. They were cases handled by my predecessor, who retired a couple of months ago. So what do you want as the outcome here, Ms. Stinton? A consensual romantic encounter outside of work isn’t territory we enforce, although the fact that he’s a doctor does complicate the matter.”

  “I don’t want him trashing my reputation here, for starters. I want my file noted, and his, that he threatened me. I want you to drag him in here, lay down the law to him, and tell him if he doesn’t keep his mouth closed, he’s fired.”

  “Do you wish to retain an attorney? Because if they were to subpoena the hospital’s records, especially from my predecessor’s era, they would uncover an interesting pattern of collusion and coverups regarding Dr. McDorman.”

  “And you didn’t say that, either?” Boyd snarked.

  Ms. Calgary smiled. “I didn’t say a word.”

  Ella shook her head. “No. I’m not looking for anything from him, or the hospital. I only want to keep my job. That’s all.”

  “Fair enough.” She put her glasses back on and started typing. When she finished, she turned her monitor so they could see it.

  It was a basic, no-nonsense statement about the facts of what had happened, as they’d told her, and included the fact that they’d shown Ms. Calgary a video of the confrontation which corroborated Ella’s version of events.

  “Is that satisfactory?”

  Ella nodded. “Yeah,” she quietly said. “Thanks.”

  Ms. Calgary turned her monitor back to face her, tapped a few keys, then passed a tablet and stylus over to Ella. “Signing this means you’ve read it and understand it and that it is your statement of the events.”

  Ella signed her name. “Will this go in both our files?”

  “Yes. I’ll be calling Dr. McDorman into my office once you’ve left. When is your next shift?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll talk to the head of Emergency Medicine and we’ll transfer him into another department.”

  She blanched. “I just want him to leave me alone.”

  “Unfortunately, based on that video, that’s not what’s going to happen. And based on his comments, I suspect there are other victims who were too scared to file HR complaints against him. I’ll be scheduling personnel interviews for the whole department.”

  Ella’s face paled further. “Why?”

  “Because I am morally obligated to make sure this isn’t a hostile work environment, and he’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.” She nodded in Boyd’s direction. “I suspect your father wants to hire an attorney for you.”

  “Damn right, I do,” he muttered. “He’s a serial predator.”

  “Exactly. Technically, I have enough I could take stronger actions against him now. And based on what I discover through my queries, I still might. Had my predecessor taken these steps against the guy years ago, none of this might have ever happened. He’s been allowed to run roughshod over personnel without oversight, and it stops now.”

  She printed out copies of the statement for Ella before they left. Boyd kept an arm around her shoulders as they headed out to his rental. “I wish you’d let me hire an attorney.”

  “No. I don’t want that. Any of it.”

  “At least you know your job is safe now. Pre-emptive strike.” He held the passenger door open for her and she slid in.

  “That doesn’t mean I won’t end up getting run out of the department,” she said once he’d climbed behind the wheel.

  “But if anyone tries to retaliate against you now, we will get an attorney and sue. He abused his position of power, and that’s one of the lesser charges against him.”

  “What about you and Caleb? Pot, meet Kettle.”

  He sighed. “That’s why I struggled for so long. We both did. And it’s why we have to be damned careful at work right now, until we can get him transferred out of my department. I can’t lose my pension, and he can’t lose his job, period. Plus, there were extenuating circumstances surrounding how we ended up together. A literal blind date.”

  She studied his profile. “What does that even mean?”

  “I’ll remind you not ask questions you don’t really want answered. Because I’ll be happy to tell you the story, but you might not wan
t to hear all of it.”

  She seemed to need a moment to process that. “Ah. Okay. Never mind.” She waved her hand in the air. “I don’t want to know my parents’ sex lives.”

  He smiled. “Greatly appreciated.”

  Chapter Ten

  Monday morning, Caleb felt weird getting ready for work alone. In a very short amount of time, he and Boyd had developed a shared routine, deftly stepping around each other, a kiss here or a touch there before leaving for work. Always careful to park away from each other in the employee lot, for now, and careful to let a few minutes spin out one way or the other between their entries to the building.

  Still no word from his parents, though. Caleb wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  What he kept repeating to himself was that he didn’t live anywhere close to them, and by not talking to him, it meant he didn’t have to talk to them.

  Of course he loved them. Except ever since he’d come to realize the truths about his sexuality, he fully understood his family’s love for him was completely conditional and situational. As long as they didn’t know he was gay, they’d love him, even if that love came with backhanded compliments and grumbles about his choices in school and career, and poorly founded, inaccurate assessments of the kind of person he was by choosing to set his sights higher. A stereotypical response from his family, who insisted they weren’t “liberal stereotypes of conservatives.”

  But he was, in their eyes, also one of the hated “them”—not just an educated “elitist,” but also gay. At least in his mom’s eyes now, even if she hadn’t spilled the beans yet.

  Maybe he’d subconsciously factored that into his move, figuring the eventual reveal and accompanying rejection would sting less if he lived farther from them. Easier to make excuses why he couldn’t come home to visit.

  It certainly helped his comfort levels.

  Monday evening, after returning to Boyd’s, Caleb cruised Facebook to look at the pictures Boyd had posted of him and Ella together.

  There was no mistaking that Ella was Boyd’s daughter, even without the picture captions proudly proclaiming her as such. She looked just like him.

  Caleb clicked the love button on every picture, even as his heart ached that he wasn’t there with Boyd. It was tempting to call Boyd to see how the talk with the guy had gone, but he didn’t want to interrupt them if they were still talking, and he didn’t want Boyd to think he had some sort of emergency and needed to speak to him right then.

  He’d wait to hear from Boyd.

  Just a few more days, then they’d be together again. Eventually, Boyd would be able to post pics of the two of them together, but not yet.

  Not when they were still hiding the truth from everyone at work. Boyd only had a couple of people friended from work, people he knew were also kinky or, at the very least, openly accepting of alternative lifestyles. Had Caleb friended him on Facebook months earlier, he would have been able to put together the obvious clues that Boyd was not only gay, but kinky.

  But eventually…

  Eventually.

  He could wait for that. He was happy to wait, because on the other side of that wait lay Boyd and his own happiness, and finally being accepted for who and what he was.

  * * * *

  Boyd and Ella stopped at the grocery store on the way back to Ella’s apartment. Boyd wanted to fix them dinner and knew neither of them felt like going out to eat.

  Besides, he wanted alone time with his daughter. While he’d missed countless dinners with her before, at least this was something he could have a memory of.

  Making his mom’s beef stew with her was a good start.

  As they cooked and talked, it took every last ounce of willpower Boyd had not to start listing all the reasons Ella would be better off moving to Florida.

  He considered that a parenting win.

  Instead, he listened to her, let her ask countless questions about his family, his life growing up.

  What little he knew about her mom.

  In this way, too, he felt like a failure. That he couldn’t give her more information about Helen except what his foggy teenaged brain had somehow managed to save on his mental hard drive. When Helen had left home, apparently she’d managed to take all the pictures she could grab of herself, rightly assuming she might never see her parents again and wanting her child to have a sense of family history. Boyd had been able to identify a few people in the pictures, but not many.

  Not nearly enough.

  “I’m going to document the hell out of everything,” Ella said. “I want my baby to know who these people are.”

  “Good plan.”

  She laid a hand on her still-flat tummy and stared at it. “Any news about her parents yet?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “It still boggles my mind that they just…threw her out.” When she looked at him again, there were tears in her eyes. “Like garbage. How could they do that to her?”

  He gathered her into his arms. “Because people are shitty and do shitty things sometimes. If it takes too much time, I’ll find out who you have to contact in the military to see if they have records on them. As their granddaughter, you might be able to do that.”

  “I don’t know why I want to find them. Not like they wanted me or Mom. If anything, I want to tell them off. Tell them what assholes they are.”

  “It’s human nature to want to come from somewhere, to know your roots.”

  “I know she felt discarded,” Ella said, breaking his heart. “Not by you—by her parents. She told me every night how much she loved me, and how she’d never abandon me the way they did her. She wanted to make sure I never felt like that. I could talk to her about anything, no matter what.”

  He didn’t have a response for that.

  When her phone rang, she frowned when she looked at the screen.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s Rick McDorman.”

  “Don’t answer it. Send it to voice mail. Depending on what he says, you might need to save that to play for Lorena Calgary.”

  She did just that, both of them waiting to see if he left a message.

  Stupid bastard did.

  “Listen, you bitch. I told you I’m not paying for your baby. You know fucking well I didn’t coerce you to have sex with me. You called me! You’d better go to HR tomorrow and retract your statement, or so help me, I will fucking ruin you. If I lose my job because of you, you’ll regret it.”

  “Guess I’m going to HR first thing in the morning to play that for her,” she said. “And I guess I can forget him willingly paying for anything.”

  “Probably for the best. Want me to go in with you to talk to her?”

  “No, I can do it.” She laid her hand on her stomach again. “So how do I break it to her that her father’s an asshole who wanted me to abort her?”

  “Or him.”

  “I’ve been thinking of her as a her. I mean, I don’t know. Just a hunch.” She stared at her stomach and then patted it. “Sorry, kiddo. You deserve better than that loser.”

  “She’ll have two grandfathers who will kick anyone’s asses who so much as look at her wrong.” He smiled. “Think of it like that.”

  Her sad smile nearly broke his heart. “It’s way better than the alternative.”

  “Alternative?”

  “Of having no one but me.”

  * * * *

  Tuesday morning, Boyd got up before Ella did and was waiting for her in the kitchen to send her to work with a hug. “You sure you don’t want me going to work with you and hanging out in a waiting room or something in case you need me to kick his ass for you?”

  At least he got a smile from her. “I can adult, Dad, but thanks.”

  “Oooh, I’m getting sarcasm already.” He grinned. “I like that.”

  This time, her smile looked a little easier as she hugged him again. “You’re making it hard to want to stick to my plan to work as long as I can before I move. Which is the adult
choice, because I need my insurance and I’m supporting myself.”

  “And yet your old man is begging you to let him help you out. Self-reliant, but stubborn.” He smiled. “Like I said, you get it honestly from me.” He slipped into the accent. “Ah, you betcha.”

  That earned him a giggle. “I promise I’ll text or call you if I feel I need parental backup today. Otherwise, I won’t be back until at least seven. Here’s a spare key for you.”

  “Thanks.” He slipped it into his pocket. “I’ll cook dinner tonight.”

  He couldn’t interpret her expression even though he sensed she wanted to say something.

  Finally, she did. “I really appreciate you giving me a second chance. I know I didn’t make a good first impression that night when I dropped this on you. I think Mom probably would have been ashamed of me for how I acted that night. I’m sorry.”

  “In the past,” he assured her. “Forgiven, forgotten.” He hugged her. “I’m not complaining because now you’re stuck with me.”

  She snorted. “You might regret that.”

  “Never. I have many regrets, but you walking into my life is not one of them.”

  Once she was out the door, he brewed a pot of coffee and sent Caleb a text.

  Call me when you have a moment alone.

  Five minutes later, as he was sitting on the couch and blissfully sipping his first mug of brew, his phone rang.

  “Good morning, Sir.”

  Boyd closed his eyes and brought Caleb’s face to mind. “Miss you.”

  “Miss you, too, Sir. How’s it going?”

  Boyd updated him on the voice mail from Rick. “I suspect today will be interesting for her at work.”

  “You’re dying to go there anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Duh.” He sipped his coffee. “What I want to do is go punch this fucker.”

  “You can’t do that, Sir.”

  “Oh, but I can. I think you mean I shouldn’t.”

  Caleb laughed at the familiar line. “What’s on the agenda for today besides trying to stay out of jail?”