Page 1 of Clinically Delicious
Chapter One
Gabriel
“When does she arrive?”
“In ten minutes.”
“Is she hot?”
My eyes burned holes in the screen as I tried to understand why my best friend was the way he was. Fitzpatrick Lovejoy—Fitz, to the rest of us, though the name felt inadequate for the man who drew a growl from my gut. Fitz was a transplant from the damp, dull gray landscape of his birth, London, England, though he embodied none of those honorable traits. Instead, Fitz exuded the cunning charm ofJane Austen’sJohn Willoughby, complete with his predatory smile and rakish manner. He wasn’t simply a womanizer; Fitz was a force of nature. A hurricane of libido who left a trail of chaos and broken hearts wherever he went.
From his very first year at Yale, Fitz had made his aspirations clear. It was a chilling boast, whispered over pub tables and in quiet corners of office hallways: his ambition was to conquer every woman within a ten-mile radius. And somehow, he had done just that, leaving behind women with shattered dreams, broken promises, soaked pillowcases, and the lingering sting of betrayal.
Fitz was a manwhore, plain and simple.
His one weakness was Winnie. She was our office manager, and every aspect of her presence made the metaphor clear: ‘sculpted from granite’meant more than her sharp jawline or the rigid way she squared her shoulders. It was the unwavering set of her jaw when challenged, the way she held her spine straight in every confrontation, and the calm, icy steadiness in her eyes that never flickered under pressure. Nothing rattled her. Not Fitz’s sly grins, nor the chaos he stirred up around her.
Winnie was the only person Fitz couldn’t charm or manipulate. That failure gnawed at him. It wasn’t just a matter of professional pride; it felt like a personal defeat. Rage simmered beneath his carefully polished exterior. Every time she dismissed his flirtatious remarks with a cool glance or shut down his impulsive plans with a single, unyielding word, his frustration deepened. He pursued her approval and admiration with a relentless energy, but her resistance only made his efforts more desperate.
Their rivalry colored the air in the office. When Fitz tried to override the scheduling protocol, Winnie would stand her ground, arms crossed and voice steady, refusing to budge even as he tried to rally support from colleagues. In meetings, she would calmly correct him, emphasizing overlooked details in his proposals, never raising her voice, always letting the facts speak for her. Staff learned to tense up whenever the two locked eyes; the polite façade stretched thin over a battle of wills. The tension was palpable, but so was a strange respect. Fitz thrived on challenge, and Winnie was the immovable object he could never defeat.
In those moments, when she refused to bend, and he refused to stop, the office became a hostile battlefield. Everyone watched, waiting to see who would yield first. But we all knew: Winnie never would.
Ignoring Fitz, I said, “Don’t care if she’s hot. All I care about is whether she’s qualified to take care of Megan.”
From the moment my daughter’s fist clenched around my finger, a primal love ignited within me. She consumed my every thought. She was mine. My tiny, fragile miracle, and she deserved everything I could give her. Her mother—Tonya—well, she was nothing but a black hole full of cheap tequila, regret, and completely incapable of offering even a sliver of devotion that my daughter deserved.
I met Tonya shortly after my mother’s diagnosis. She’d been an easy, cheap thrill, refilling my glass until my world swam into a hazy oblivion. Nine months later, I was a father.
I tried. God, how I tried. But the truth, cold and brutal as a surgeon’s knife, sliced through what I had already suspected—that she deliberately sabotaged our first night together. I had hoped that with the birth of our daughter, she would change, but when she tried to blackmail me, threatening to cut me off completely and take my daughter to sun-drenched California, I’d had enough.
The custody battle involved two years of legal wrangling, depositions, and endless courtroom visits, but ultimately, it was Tonya herself who messed up when she left our daughter unattended while she went out on a date. In the end, I got full permanent custody, and Tonya got two weeks in the summer.
“Who recommended her?” Julien asked staunchly.
Dr. Julien Darcy, the clinic’s resident neurosurgeon, a man sculpted from granite and starch, radiated an icy precision that chilled the very air around him. His office, a sterile monument to order, gleamed under the fluorescent hum, each file precisely aligned, each pen meticulously placed. The scent of antiseptic hung heavy, a constant reminder of his unwavering adherence to protocol.
Julien wasn’t just a rule follower; he was a rule worshipper.
A devotee at the altar of regulation. Every comma in every guideline was sacred scripture, and woe betide anyone who dared to stray from the text. His clashes with Nathan were legendary, eruptions of controlled fury sparked by Nathan’s infuriatingly casual disregard for Julien’s meticulously constructed world.
And then there was Vivian, Julien’s sister, a whirlwind of vibrant chaos, a living, breathing antithesis to his rigid existence. Her presence was a splash of color in his monochrome world, a constant, maddening affront to his carefully curated order. He loathed her, yes, but a strange, unsettling undercurrent of fascination pulsed beneath the surface of his icy disdain.
“Does it matter?” Nathan questioned. “This is the seventh nanny in a month. Gabe needs to stop running them off.”
Grumbling, I muttered, “Not running them off. I just refuse to sleep with them. Besides, I’m not too hopeful. She’s the daughter of my next-door neighbor. If she’s anything like her mother, she won’t last the day.”
“Come on, Gabriel,” Nathan sighed. “Give her a chance.”
“I am giving her a chance, Nathan. I hired her, didn’t I?”
Dr. Nathan Carter, the clinic’s resident doctor of internal medicine, was a man whose eyes held the weight of a thousand unspoken secrets. He was the clinic’s moral compass. Or rather, the wildly swinging pendulum of our practice. His empathy frequently clashed with the boundaries of ethics, which often drowned out the faint whisper of his integrity.
Nathan wasn’t exactly shady, not in the blatant, back-alley kind of way. But the desperation of his patients’ pleas often saw him bending, then snapping the rules whenever insurance companies dared to withhold life’s necessities, which annoyed Julien and his strict adherence to the law and the oath we’d all taken.
Looking at his watch, Julien commented, “She’s got five more minutes, then she’s late. This isn’t looking good for her. As a hired employee, first impressions set the stage. She should have already been there.”
“Jesus, Julien,” Hayden, the oldest of us, groaned.
