Chapter Two

Zoe shifted her position on the emergency room bed, refusing to open her eyes even though sleep was the furthest thing from her mind. At least with her eyes closed, she didn’t have to make eye contact with Connor.

Luckily, they’d hit the ER at a quiet moment. By the time Connor had arrived, a nurse was calling Zoe back to an exam room. After that, the wait to see the doctor hadn’t been long, and then she’d been trucked off for X-rays before returning to the room where Connor waited.

All of which had helped to distract her. But what she really needed was to be home, not stuck in a tiny room wearing nothing more than a hospital gown, her best beige basics, and a pair of pink knee socks because she hadn’t done laundry for two weeks.

He wasn’t very chatty. That hadn’t changed. Connor was the kind of guy you had to draw out. The kind of guy who was comfortable with silence and whose presence somehow managed to make you comfortable with it, too.

Frankly, the perfect kind of guy to sit next to you in a hospital when your head hurt and making small talk was the last thing you wanted to do.

Unfortunately, all that quiet gave her plenty of time to ponder why she was now aware of him in a way she never had been before. It wasn’t that she’d never noticed he was attractive. In the three years she’d known him, he’d always had that Clark Kent, “I wear glasses and plaid shirts but I’m really sexy as hell” sort of presence about him. He was absentminded and uncomfortable in groups, but even if he managed to screw up his dates fairly regularly, he’d never had any trouble getting them. Probably because rich, successful guys with killer bodies and quiet smiles didn’t exactly grow on trees.

In her defense, he did look different this morning. For one thing, he was wearing contacts, revealing smoky gray-blue eyes she’d definitely never noticed before. And then there were his biceps, normally hidden by his clothes. They were downright dangerous to a girl in a weakened state.

Not to mention his chest. The one that had momentarily rendered her speechless—a state she rarely experienced. Because, damn it, Connor Ashton had a six-pack, and now that she’d seen it, how could she be expected to unsee it?

Zoe gave herself a mental shake. She was really going off the deep end.

This was all probably just a head injury–induced hallucination, and tomorrow she would go back to thinking of him as her slightly nerdy, hapless friend Connor.

Her eyes opened with relief at the sound of a knock on the door. A moment later, Dr. Checker, the doctor she’d seen for a few minutes earlier that morning, walked in.

Connor stood as the doctor entered the room. She was several inches shorter than Zoe, an older woman with thick black hair streaked with white, and he towered over her. “I forgot how large you are. You should sit back down. I’ll never be able to see over you.” She shot Zoe a quick look. “You’re okay with him staying while we talk?”

Zoe gave the doctor a wry smile. “If he sits down.”

Connor gave them an apologetic look as he sat back down. “Sorry.”

Dr. Checker flipped a switch on a light board and stuck a series of X-rays in place. The display was close enough to the bed that Zoe didn’t have to move, which she appreciated immensely, because every time she did move, her head and her hand seemed to throb extra hard.

“Now, we didn’t do a CT scan because you aren’t showing any signs of a severe concussion, but we do need to watch for symptoms.” She pinned Zoe with a piercing look. “Has anything changed since I saw you last? Any nausea or vomiting? Any changes in your pain?”

“No,” Zoe said. “I mean, other than that my arm hurts like crazy.”

The doctor was unimpressed. “Not surprising.” She turned back to the light board. “We did check for injury to your neck, and I’m happy to report there’s nothing there I’m concerned about. However, you do have a hairline fracture in your radius, and it is possible that you have a mild concussion—you’ll need to keep a close eye on that for the next twenty-four hours or so to make sure your symptoms don’t worsen. But all in all, you’ve escaped from what could have been a serious accident with relatively minor injuries.”

“They don’t feel minor,” Zoe said, feeling every inch of that hairline fracture as her wrist throbbed painfully.

“You had a head-on collision with a streetlight,” the doctor chided. “Given that you might as well have not been wearing a helmet at all, I’d say you were pretty lucky. Now, the bad news is that your headache could linger for several days. The good news is that your nose isn’t broken, so the swelling there should go down by tomorrow. You’ll need to visit orthopedics in a day or so or so to get your wrist casted, but the fracture is slight enough that I don’t think you’ll have to spend more than a few weeks in a cast. So, barring anything that develops over the next couple of days, you should be able to bounce back relatively quickly.”

“I should count my blessings, you’re saying?”

Easier said than done, when it felt like you’d dropped an anvil on your face.

“That’s it,” the doctor replied. She gave them a quick nod. “Now, any questions?”

Connor spoke up from his chair. “I assume she should take a little time off? While we’re watching for the concussion?”

Zoe blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I expect you’re about five minutes from reading your latest emails,” he said pointedly. “And twenty from replying to them.”

Zoe stared at her hands, which were, in fact, itching to grab her phone. “I have a very demanding client.”

“A concussion is nothing to play around with,” Connor said. “Besides, even your demanding client takes weekends off.”

The doctor cleared her throat, then gave Zoe a serious look. “Sorry, but he’s right. I need you to take off the next twenty-four hours, minimum. No work. Stay off the computer and phone. No email. No reading, no TV—nothing. We want your brain to recover quickly, all right?”

Zoe drew back in horror. “No phone? No email? What are you talking about?”

“Look, you injured your wrist, and we’re giving it a rest, right? Same thing goes for your brain. Standard concussion protocol. If you want to lengthen your recovery, go ahead and try to be a superwoman. If you want to get better quickly, close down shop for a little while. Turn off all the inputs to your brain. Make sure you didn’t do any more serious damage before you start trying to take on the world.”

“I don’t exactly have the kind of job that you can just ignore,” Zoe said, trying not to think about all the work she had planned to do this afternoon.

Because Zoe’s law firm handled most of the legal work for Livend, and Livend was freakishly successful, Zoe and her partners, Luke and Rafe, were normally very, very busy. Unfortunately, Zoe’s usual side of things—the patent and engineering work—had slowed down lately. As they’d matured, Livend had started shifting to bigger deals with more established companies. It was work she could do, but her specialty was dealing with new start-ups, helping them identify and protect their intellectual property. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up taking the crap work that others didn’t want to do, simply because she was the one with the most time available.

What she really needed was someone big. Someone that could put her on the map. Livend was Luke’s client, and everyone knew it. She needed a client like that, and she wasn’t going to rest until she had it.

“I’m the last person to tell my patients to do nothing, but if I could write a prescription for you, it would be to spend the day in bed at home. Or even better, at someone else’s home, where you won’t be tempted to get up and do laundry or clean the dishes. Lie low, check out the back of your eyelids, and tell your demanding client to back off for a little while. You can go back to work in a few days.”

The idea of taking a few days off was one of the funnier things Zoe had ever heard. But clearly, the doctor was not going to budge. She decided for now, at least, she’d acquiesce.

“Okay, fine. No work. Back of the eyelids. I assume sleep is acceptable?”

Dr. Checker nodded. “Absolutely. Just make sure someone checks on you every four to six hours for the next twenty-four hours or so. We want to make sure you aren’t showing any signs of a serious concussion before we let you back at your regular life. Do you have someone to keep an eye on you if I release you?”

Well, that was a hell of an embarrassing question.

Because the truth was, she didn’t.

She had no family in town. No close friends she could ask to check on her. Luke and Rafe were great guys, but she wouldn’t ask them to wake her up in the middle of the night to check her for concussion symptoms. She had no boyfriend, no lover…hell, her last date had been over a month ago.

On the other hand, she did have her phone, which was sort of like a friend.

And then there was the little device that sat on her counter and told her the weather and made jokes when she asked. That was like a friend, too, right?

Zoe nodded and mentally crossed her fingers. “Of course.”

“And who might that be?” The doctor cocked her head and studied Zoe, as if she could see right through her facade.

Zoe pursed her lips. She considered saying, “My friend Alexa,” but then she imagined the doctor asking if she meant the Amazon home assistant.

That would be beyond embarrassing.

“Zoe?” the doctor prodded.

She opened her mouth, but blatant lying wasn’t really her thing. And now that the doctor had her pinned, she couldn’t come up with a name to save her life.

“Me, of course.” Connor spoke confidently from the other side of the room. “She’ll be coming home with me.”