Dr. Tempt Me - A Possessive Doctor Romance

“What are you talking about?”

I looked back at her and hesitated. “I’ve been staring at the numbers since last night.”

“I thought we agreed it’s all gibberish.”

“And it still is, but I started to notice some patterns.” I turned the laptop toward her and pointed at the first row. “Three letters. Always three. And look, you see some of them occur over and over again, see that?”

She nodded. “LMR and DCK keep coming up.”

“A few others too. Each series of letters is linked with a few different numbers in these columns, and the numbers and letters seem totally random, right?”

“As far as I can tell. But they can’t be. That’d make no sense.”

I nodded and opened up the hospital website. I clicked through a few links then showed her a single website with a simple heading. She squinted and frowned.

“Charity?” she asked.

“Donors,” I corrected. “This is a list of the most prominent donors, the ones that want to be named anyway.” I scrolled down through a list of wealthy, absurdly prominent people, and stopped at a name, highlighting it. “Letitia Ramirez.”

She frowned a little bit. “So what?”

“LMR. I bet her middle name is something like Missy.”

She snorted. “You think that spreadsheet is a list of donors?”

I scrolled down again and stopped at another name. “Derek Keller. I bet his middle name is Chris. And there are a few more: John Marble, Heather Wilson, Len Ark, Fay Ranger, Jen Watts, Corrado Blanch. Each of those names has a corresponding three-letter sequence on that sheet, and the numbers in the columns are all pretty damn big.”

“Big enough to get on the website?”

I nodded with a grin. “Damn right they are. Here, look at Letitia.” I found her first donation. “I think what we’re looking at is money in and out. See, she first donated fifty thousand, then it gets spent in small chunks, until it’s all gone.”

“Interesting,” Fiona said, seeming to warm up to the topic. “So this tracks money then.”

“Exactly, but there’s a catch. See, look here.” I pointed at a three-letter sequence: VSL. “All of these donations are larger than the smaller payouts, but the sheet claims the donations were all spent.”

“Money’s missing.” Her eyes went wide. “Holy shit. This is it, right?”

“It might be,” I said.

“But this has to be it. Someone’s making charitable donations to the hospital, but the money’s not getting completely accounted. Some of it goes missing.”

“Big chunks, actually. Almost all of it.”

She sucked in a breath. “This has to be what she was talking about with those guys.”

“I think you’re right. We don’t have proof right now, but there has to be some way to find it.”

She turned to me and a strange, bright excitement crossed her expression. She got to her feet and threw her arms around me, pulling me against her in a tight hug. Her body was warm and she smelled like hospital soap and fresh cut flowers, and I wasn’t shy in letting my hands linger on her hips.

“You did it,” she said. “God, Maria’s going to be so pissed.”

She pulled back but we stayed there, inches away from each other. I shifted toward her and felt my heart do a soft flip in my chest as I leaned closer. She didn’t pull away like I expected, and when my lips met hers, she sucked in a breath and neither of us moved, our lips pressed together, pleasure flooding my body—until she kissed me, and I kissed her back, and I held her tight against me.

That kiss was wild and triumphant and crazy, and I knew I might never get another like it in my life, but she pressed herself tight against me and I didn’t let her go. Slowly our lips parted and she took a breath, blinking a little, her mouth still so close to mine.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she said.

“You might be right.”

“But you’re not going to stop, are you?”

“No, I’m not. And I don’t think you want me to.”

“I don’t know what I want.” She pulled away, but didn’t leave.

“Why did you run away last night?”

She grimaced and stared down at the floor like I’d spilled cold water down her back. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“I understand, it’s just, you can tell me.”

“Yeah, and what? You’ll fix me?” She looked back up and I saw that spark of anger again.

I didn’t know what she held back, but I had a feeling that it was the flame that turned her into an inferno. Whatever happened to make her this way wouldn’t let her go, and now she still burned bright, hated the world for whatever it did to her. I didn’t want to fix her, although I would if I could—I only wanted to know her and to understand what motivated her, what made her run away, and what would make her want to stay.