Chapter 1
Outside Room 711. Before turning the doorknob, I took a steadying breath, a habit born of sheer routine.
Thirty-four years old. An orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports injuries.
That meant I had handled the bodies of countless athletes over the past few years. Ruthlessly conditioned muscles and joints mangled by injury were, to me, nothing more than structural frameworks to be diagnosed and reconstructed. That was how I was trained. At least, that was what I believed.
My husband, the head of general surgery, worked on another floor of the same hospital. Six years of marriage.
Somewhere along the line, we had morphed into well-matched professional partners rather than a married couple, and we lacked for nothing. Yet, it had been so long since I'd been physically overpowered by someone, since I'd wanted someone so desperately I couldn't breathe, that I couldn't even remember what it felt like.
It wasn't something I normally thought about. There was no reason to.
The moment I checked the chart, the name registered instantly.
Colton Brooks. Twenty years old. Professional baseball player.
A first baseman boasting the league's highest slugging percentage, who had clinched both the home run title with 56 homers and Rookie of the Year last season. Now, he was a patient admitted to my ward for a two-week conservative treatment plan after partially tearing his knee ligament during a slide.
Terrified my face might betray the slightest hint of a fan's excitement, I steadied my breathing one last time and pushed the door open.
The moment he came into view, leaning back against the hospital bed, Room 711 suddenly felt suffocatingly small.
Six foot six. His upper body, ruthlessly forged over the course of the season, simply could not be contained by a standard-issue hospital gown. The buttons wouldn't stretch halfway across his impossibly broad shoulders and thick pectoral muscles. The hand holding his phone loosely was large enough to snap a baseball bat a hand possessing the brute strength of a beast rather than any delicate refinement. It was absurdly huge.
If those fingers were to grip my face, it felt as though they could crush my skull in an instant.
Even though he definitely knew I had walked in, he didn't so much as lift his head.
"You're here?"
Normally, a patient's rudeness would have annoyed me. Yet strangely, I found myself having to suppress an entirely different sensation swelling beneath the surface. I deliberately chose a colder tone.
"Call me Doctor."
He slowly lowered his phone. And for the first time, he looked up at me. His face was entirely nonchalant, yet in that brief, deliberate gaze, I distinctly felt his eyes trace the length of my white coat.
"Understood, Doctor."
It was an obedient response. Still, a faint flutter erupted low in my stomach. He was the patient confined to the bed, but from the very beginning, it felt as though he was the one controlling the oxygen in the room.
I pulled out my stethoscope and approached him. Taking a shallow breath, I unfastened the top buttons of his gown, exposing the hard, broad expanse of his chest and the sharp definition of his abs.
I pressed the cold head of the stethoscope against his bare skin. For some reason, the bite of cold metal against flesh sent a thrilling jolt traveling right up my fingertips.
The body heat radiating beneath the metal was unnaturally high. It was a searing heat that felt as if it would travel up the stethoscope and set my own chest on fire. Then, the sound of his heartbeat echoed against my eardrums. Slow, powerful, and utterly unwavering the heart of a perfect athlete.
In stark contrast to that heavy, steady rhythm, my own heart was thrashing violently, as if broken.
To continue the examination, I slowly moved the stethoscope down toward his abdomen, listening to that unyielding beat.
And then it happened.
My gaze dropped involuntarily to his lower half, and the breath caught in my throat.
I could see the outline beneath his hospital pants.
It wasn't just a subtle swell. It was unmistakable.
Impossibly thick and tenting sharply upward. The thin fabric did absolutely nothing to mask the silhouette that asserted its presence without a sliver of hesitation.
It was a size that couldn't be hidden.
My mind went completely blank. My entire body stiffened as if I had been anesthetized, freezing me in place with the stethoscope still gripped tightly in my hand. The clinical detachment I believed I had so thoroughly armed myself with crumbled soundlessly in a matter of seconds. Those few seconds were the beginning of everything.
My face burned hot. Between my thighs, a faint, involuntary thrum of heat began to build.
I had examined hundreds of bodies like this. But this time—it was entirely different.
Flustered, I jerked my head up to check his face. I was terrified he had noticed me freeze while staring at his lap. But Colton wasn't even looking at me; he was staring blankly at the ceiling. Utterly nonchalant.
That sheer nonchalance was somehow even more terrifying.
Then, his lips parted languidly, still aimed at the ceiling.
"Tell me if it's uncomfortable."
Something scorching surged up the back of my throat. I couldn't figure out if he was talking about his own physical discomfort as a patient, or if it was a deliberate taunt aimed at the doctor who had just frozen while staring openly at his arousal. My heart hammered uncontrollably.
A heavy heat rose from my lower abdomen, crushing down on my chest.
Caught between sheer panic and an inexplicable, blinding arousal, I couldn't lift my hand. I lingered on his abdomen for one second too long, rationalizing to myself that it was a clinically justified, perfectly normal examination.
But the searing heat radiating just millimeters from my fingertips made my mind blur, and during that single second, what I was lingering on wasn't an examination—it was him.
Ultimately unable to endure the tension, I pulled the stethoscope away a beat faster than usual.
"I'll check on your progress."
My mind was a tangled mess as I turned away, desperately trying to suppress the tremble in my voice. The wall of clinical reason I had tried to maintain had already sustained a crack that could not be sealed. I wanted to deny the reality of myself in this moment, fleeing the room with a flushed face.
This man is a patient. I repeated it internally, but it lacked even a fraction of persuasive power.
As I hastily exited the room, struggling to level my ragged breathing, his massive, heavy presence seemed to follow me, sticking to my back like something viscous.
But at that moment, I didn't realize.
During that brief, agonizingly decisive moment when I first examined him and my composure shattered Nurse Isabella Torres had been watching the entire thing through the glass window in the corridor. My rigid back, frozen in a naked display of lust and panic, had been perfectly, vividly captured in her eyes.
11:00 PM. The night shift at the hospital is like a dark, heavy curtain that coldly suffocates the rationality of the day. I was caught in a brief, restless sleep in the on-call room when I was jolted awake by a page: knee pain had flared up in Room 711.
The darkened corridors were dead quiet. Every trace of the frantic, bustling energy of the daytime had been erased, and Nurse Sua had temporarily stepped away to tend to another patient. Cutting through the chilly air, I carefully opened the door to Room 711 and stepped inside.
