Dr. Tempt Me - A Possessive Doctor Romance

The firm was called McPurty and Donahue, and had about six employees as far as I could tell. The office park itself looked nice, but older, probably built in the eighties or nineties, and not updated since. I wondered how long these people had been in their offices, how many hours they logged behind the same old desks, doing the same tasks year in and year out—and I wondered how long I’d be behind my own desk, treating the same kinds of patients, over and over. It wasn’t a bad life, not by a long shot, but it was strange to see it from that perspective.

I got out of the car and walked across the lot with my head down. I reached the door that led into the office and tried the knob, but of course it was locked. I moved around the side of the building, testing each window, until one at the far end was unlocked and slid upwards.

I let out a sigh of relief. I brought a lock-pick kit with me, and I watched a bunch of tutorials online about how to pick locks, but I had no clue how to actually use it. My plan was to climb in a window if I got lucky, or to pick the front door lock if I didn’t, and fortunately it wasn’t going to come to that.

I pushed the window all the way up then hoisted myself up and in. I slid headfirst down on top of a desk and knocked paper, pens, an old mug, a trophy for best chili in the tri-state area, and several pictures in frames down onto a carpeted floor. I cursed and barely caught myself before I crashed down and broke my neck.

The office was fairly large with some chairs against the far wall, several filing cabinets, and a desk that stretched around the corner and had multiple screens. I walked to the filing cabinet and opened it up, then rifled through with my phone flashlight illuminating the pages.

I definitely had the right place. They were tax documents for a whole host of businesses, and it took me a second to recognize the filing system. I opened another drawer and found Mercy General’s file, but it didn’t have much in it, only some general forms from this last year.

I snuck out of the office. There was a small waiting room lobby up front and to the right. I went left, ducked into another office with a similar setup, and went through those folders. This time, there was nothing on Mercy.

I checked two more offices, and came up empty, before finding one last room down a flight of stairs. It was a storage space, with row after row of filing cabinets, and I grinned to myself.

“Leave it to accountants to keep a paper trail,” I said softly to myself, opening drawer after drawer.

It was slow going and took me a while, but eventually I found the Mercy files. It took up an entire drawer and then some, and I began to flip through the pages, looking for anything that would be useful. There was a lot, and it stretched back almost a decade, but I focused on the last three years and began to set documents aside.

When I had what I hoped would be enough, I snuck back up, found the secretary’s desk, and used the fax machine. I briefly wondered if the nurses on night duty would notice a bunch of financial documents coming through into the neuro department at two in the morning, but it didn’t really matter—stranger shit happened around Mercy.

It took me another twenty minutes to fax everything, and when it was done, I did my best to put it all away. I closed the window, got the office cleaned up, then snuck out the front door—leaving it unlocked behind me.

I figured they’d come back, realize it was open, and be annoyed they forgot to close up, but relieved nothing got stolen.

I walked back to the car, got behind the wheel, and drove back home.* * *Fiona showed up that night with a stack of papers under one arm and a bottle of red wine in her hand. “Well, you managed to do it,” she said.

I let her inside and shut the door behind her. “Told you, I can be very convincing.”

She laughed and dropped the papers on the kitchen table then held up the bottle. “Drink?”

“Of course.” I took it from her, opened it up, and poured two glasses as she started paging through the documents.

“There’s a lot of crap here,” she said. “I’ve been looking through it most of the day.”

“Yeah? Find anything interesting?” I sipped my wine and placed her glass down in front of her.

“A few things.” She pulled a couple documents out and set them aside. “But no smoking gun, not yet.”