A Matter of Trust (The Boston Five Series #5) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Also by Poppy J. Anderson

  Newsletter

  A Romance Novel

  A matter of trust

  Poppy J. Anderson

  Boston 5

  (Book 5)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, businesses, organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A matter of trust

  Copyright © 2016 by Poppy J. Anderson

  Cover design by Catrin Sommer – www.rauschgold.com

  Edited by Annie Cosby

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Publication: 2016

  www.poppyjanderson.com

  [email protected]

  Prologue

  A voice in Cody’s head told him to scream.

  There actually was a scream, and it was so loud that his head would explode soon, even though nobody could hear the scream except himself. He was the only one who could hear it—the panicked, horrified, and terrifying scream that scared him to no end.

  Cody squeezed his eyes shut with all his might, pressed his lips together, and hoped this was just a terrible nightmare, that he would wake up in his bed in a few moments. And that his mom would make breakfast, and his dad would play a round of basketball in the driveway with him and Matt.

  But instead there were sirens, loud voices, and pain that was so much worse than a few months ago, when he'd fallen off his bike. And then there was that scream that had wanted to burst from his throat since the moment he'd woken up with his head upside down and had seen his dad's face all bloody and his mom's seat empty. And Matt …

  “Cody Baker, ten years old. Suspected multiple trauma with injuries to the head and thorax after a severe car accident on 93. Tachycardia and hypotension on the way here. We were able to start an IV and give him saline.”

  “Give me his vital signs.”

  “We need to stabilize his spine and get a CAT ready.”

  “He’s bleeding from his thorax.”

  “Prepare a pleural drainage.”

  “Put in a bag of O negative.”

  “The left upper quadrant seems to be unobstructed.”

  “Where’s the ultrasound?”

  Cody opened his eyes in slow motion but closed them again quickly, because the glaring light blinded him. He struggled to focus on the anxious voices around him but couldn’t understand what they were saying. For some reason he wasn’t able to move a muscle. Instead, he lay motionless on his back, feeling as if he was observing himself from a distance. The pain was still there, but he was so tired now that he barely even felt it anymore.

  All he wanted was sleep …

  “Terry said the police took a drunk into custody. Supposedly he ran right into them at 60 miles per hour. He doesn’t have a scratch. He was driving one of those big-ass SUVs. The boy’s family wasn’t quite so lucky. The mother is still—”

  “Nurse Donovan, please focus on your job and hold your tongue. The patient can hear you.”

  “Of course, Dr. Fitzpatrick. I’m sorry.”

  Slowly, Cody turned his head to the side and blinked, because he was beginning to feel nauseous, and because he wanted to look for his mom and his dad and his brother. The people around him in scrubs and lab coats were a blur, just like the strange machines and tiled walls. A thought flashed through his mind for a brief moment: his mom watching that terribly cheesy hospital show on TV each week, where people were dressed like this, and where other people kept dying …

  Mom!

  Suddenly someone put a hand on his head, and then he heard a calm voice. “Hey, Cody. My name is Kyle, and I’m a doctor. You’re in the hospital. Can you tell me how you feel? Where it hurts?”

  With a mixture of exhaustion and panic, Cody tilted his head back a little, his eyes searching for the man who belonged to the voice, until he found a friendly face right above his own. He wanted to tell the blond man that he felt sick, he felt weird, he didn’t know what he was doing here—and most of all he wanted to know where his mom, his dad, and Matt were. He opened his mouth but couldn’t produce a word.

  “It’s okay, Cody. Everything will be all right.” The man gave him a reassuring smile. “We’ll take care of you and make sure you’re better quickly.”

  Cody shook his head and tried to ask after his parents and brother, but he felt like he couldn’t breathe, and then a machine started an ear-splitting beep.

  “Dr. Fitzpatrick, his respiration—”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” the blond doctor said. His hand was still on Cody’s head. “A fifth ET tube, please.”

  Cody gulped for air, looking into the man’s face, frightened as hell. He didn’t understand what was happening here, but it scared him. Even though he was already ten years old and had actually gotten his very first kiss a month ago, he now wanted his mom to be here to take him into her arms. He didn’t want to be alone, prodded and examined by strangers. He needed his mom. And his dad, and his little brother.

  He needed his family.

  He sobbed and shook his head.

  “It’s okay, Cody. Everything will be all right,” the doctor named Kyle repeated, squatting down next to the stretcher that held Cody’s small body. “We’ll take care of you,” he went on earnestly. “I’m going to insert a small tube into your throat, to help you breathe. It’s not going to hurt, so no need to be scared, okay, pal?”

  Cody wanted to say so many things, he wanted to cry, he didn’t want to be here. He wanted to run away, because no matter what the nice doctor said, he was scared and he didn’t want a tube in his throat. But the only thing he could scratch out was, “Promise?”

  The man squeezed his hand. “I’m going to watch over you. I promise.”

  Chapter 1

  “Are you sure you want to get up? I would try to catch some more sleep if I were you.”

  Kyle Fitzpatrick rubbed his eyes, yawned, and then held out his hand for his roommate Pam to hand him the cup of coffee currently filling the bedroom with a fantastic smell. It wasn’t just the coffee that had woken him, though. Thanks to his training as a physician, he was used to getting up at the most impossible times, sleeping less than thirty minutes at a stretch, and not needing an alarm clock because his body clock told him it was time to leave the bed.

  Even though he’d only lain down five hours ago—and after a twenty-hour shift—he wanted to get quite a few things done today. He couldn’t afford to stay in bed any longer. Though his soft mattress was very tempting right now …

  “When did you get home?” Pam asked. “I didn’t even hear anyone come in. Must have been really late—I was reading an article about intracranial injuries until the wee hours of the morning. It was just published. Two days ago, we had a subarachnoid hemorrhage in neurology, and it was clipped in the OR. Stevenson let me put in the clip. That was insane!”<
br />
  Kyle took a large sip from his cup and reminded himself that while Pam had the annoying habit of chatting nonstop in the morning, she also made a terrific cup of coffee. At the moment he was tired, fighting the urge to lie down again, and needed to fully wake up before he could do anything else. He could have done without Pam’s report on an aneurysm, but he kept his mouth shut. Instead he took another sip, studiously ignoring the short-haired blonde who didn’t seem ready to leave him alone. And who kept describing, in great detail, the state her patient had been in, as if this was a round with the medical director.

  He desperately wanted to take his cup and disappear into the bathroom to have some peace, but since he was naked under the covers, he couldn’t get up while Pam was here.

  A few things needed to remain private after all.

  He might know her preferred tampon brand, and she might have fed him chicken soup when the terrible flu hit him two years ago, but that didn’t mean he would prance around naked in front of her. During med school, they’d practiced drawing blood, starting an IV, and examining the abdomen on each other, but complete nudity was taboo.

  That was what had made it possible for them to be friends for nearly ten years, and roommates for three. Kyle could do without the drama. Pam shared his apartment and was his colleague and also his best friend. If they’d ever had the moronic idea to get naked in front of each other, it would have ended in disaster. If he wanted to see a naked woman, he went out and flirted, and chances were he’d find someone who wanted to spend the night with him.

  He didn’t have the time for much more anyway. As a man who’d just gotten his specialist qualification and was working in a hospital, and who also had six nieces and nephews he liked spending time with, he had no idea how he could fit in a functioning relationship, not even theoretically.

  And on top of all that, there was Cody.

  Contrary to his twin brother, Ryan, who’d fought tooth and nail against even spelling out the word “relationship” until two years ago, Kyle was the type of man who would have liked to have a woman at his side. He was thirty-one now, certainly an age when people got married, planned to have kids, and took out a loan to buy a townhouse. But he was still living in a shared apartment, rode his bike to work, and visited his mom when he craved comfort food. All in all, he was damn happy with the way he lived his life, because he lived and breathed his work as a pediatrician. There was still plenty of time to start a family of his own. But if he was being completely honest, he would have loved to have a girlfriend. Unfortunately, his strong sense of realism told him there wasn’t a woman alive who’d stand for his stressful work schedule.

  His mom kept pointing out that his older sister, Kayleigh, was also a doctor and worked in the same hospital, and she was married and the mother of twin toddlers. But Kyle couldn’t imagine ever approaching his work with any less energy than he currently did. Maybe his mother was disappointed that he wasn’t going to give her another grandchild any time soon, but she already had six of them after all, and his own twin seemed to have developed surprising interest in houses recently, so he was sure it wouldn’t take much longer before another Fitzpatrick would be added to the family.

  “Tomorrow at noon, Stevenson wants to perform a hemispherectomy on a five-year-old, and I’ll be allowed to assist. The gallery will be open. Will you come and watch it?”

  Kyle yawned a second time and then shook his head, leaning to one side to put down the coffee cup next to his bed.

  “Tomorrow at noon Cody’s cast is being taken off, and I promised him I’d be there.” He stretched briefly. “And after that, we need to discuss his new physical therapy plan with Hank.”

  When Pam didn’t reply right away, Kyle looked up and brushed a few unruly strands of hair from his face. His roommate was chewing her lower lip in a show of indecision, wrinkling her nose.

  With a sigh he asked, “What is it?”

  “Kyle, I don’t want to be intrusive, but Cody is your patient. You’ve grown far too fond of the kid already. Maybe you should try to keep a little more professional distance.”

  He shrugged one shoulder helplessly. “Cody’s completely on his own, Pam. What am I supposed to do? The kid has been in the hospital for three months, he’s lost his parents and brother, and he’s only ten years old.”

  “But he’s still your patient,” Pam insisted gently. “You treated him as a physician. Now it’s time for you to slowly back off.”

  Kyle did not reply to that.

  During his years at med school, he’d been taught not to build personal relationships with his patients but to deal with them in a strictly professional manner. Empathy and compassion were allowed, but anything beyond that was unwanted in a doctor.

  But that was much easier said than done.

  Pediatricians generally felt more strongly about their patients anyway, but when you treated a ten-year-old who’d barely survived a severe car accident and undergone enough surgical procedures for ten lives, how could you do anything but build a special relationship with the little fellow? When he’d been brought in, Kyle had promised the kid he’d watch over him in the ER, and he’d kept his promise. What else could he have done after Cody’s mom died right away, his dad died after two weeks in a coma, and his little brother had gone into cardiac arrest during an operation?

  The boy was completely alone, had suffered horrible injuries that he was recovering from very slowly, and had to deal with the fact that he no longer had a family.

  As Kyle had sat by Cody’s bedside at night, dealing with patient files and keeping an eye on his vitals, the kid had grown on him.

  And ever since that day he was brought in, Kyle had felt responsible for Cody.

  Pam meant well, but how could she even remotely guess what he felt? She hadn’t sat by Cody’s bed or been tasked with telling him that his family had all perished in the crash. And she hadn’t been the one to try to comfort the sobbing boy.

  “It’s not that easy, Pam,” he replied with a sigh. “The little guy doesn’t have a family anymore.”

  “But you’re not his family either,” she reminded him, bending to pick up his empty coffee cup. “I feel for the kid, too, but you’re just his doctor.”

  He’d been a lot more than Cody’s doctor for a long while, because the boy had made him his confidant, too. And Kyle had taken the bright ten-year-old into his heart. He worried about the boy, visited him every day, even if he didn’t have a shift, and was happy to watch as Cody gradually got better. How on earth could he stop caring about and worrying over him now?

  He already cared too much; it was as simple as that.

  Pam was a surgeon, so naturally her relationship with her patients was more distant than his. And of course she hadn’t spent as much time with Cody as he had, hadn’t observed his progress, his attempts to walk again after several surgeries. Nor had she put flowers on the grave of Cody’s family when the little guy asked for it.

  But Kyle had done all those things.

  He didn’t respond, however, since he didn’t want to confess to his roommate that Cody had become so much more than his patient. Instead, he just looked up at Pam and said, “Let’s change the subject. What are your plans for today?”

  She shrugged and leaned against the doorframe. “It’s Sunday, and I don’t have to do a weekend shift for the first time in weeks, which means I’m going to order pizza and lounge around in bed watching Netflix for hours.”

  “Sounds tempting.” Kyle made a face and wrapped the sheet around his still-naked thighs. “My mom’s probably making her famous meatloaf. Care to join me?”

  Pam emitted a hoarse laugh and raised her arms as if to ward off evil. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass.”

  Since his mom’s meatloaf was beyond compare, Kyle raised a confused eyebrow. “Are you really that obsessed with Netflix? Why else would you spurn my mom’s meatloaf?”

  His roommate rolled her eyes. “No offense, Kyle, but the last time you made me join you
for dinner at your mom’s house, I was under the impression that she was already thinking about our wedding cake. So I’m going to stay put.”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. “She’s Irish and has a strong romantic streak. Plus, she doesn’t believe men and women can live under the same roof and not have sex.”

  Pam snorted. “That may be true for men and women in general, but we’re doctors. I wish I’d finally see a naked male who isn’t my patient!”

  Kyle was polite enough to ignore her whining and refrain from mentioning that Pam could easily get a date with Max, the paramedic who’d been hitting on her for months. Surgeons were terrible snobs, so they only went out with other surgeons—paramedics were beneath them. Kyle had been a paramedic himself before he went on to study medicine, and thus her attitude should have annoyed him. Fortunately, he felt nothing but amusement.

  “My mom knows you’re my best friend,” he said before Pam could further lament her lack of sex. “Will you come along if I promise you won’t have to try on a wedding dress today?”

  Pam shook her head. “I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m rather exhausted and don’t have the energy for the weekly Fitzpatrick fight. You’ll have to face that on your own.”

  “Well, thanks a lot,” Kyle complained. “Don’t be too kind.”

  She disappeared with a laugh.

  The weekly fight began only a few hours later, when the family gathered at his mom’s house, like every Sunday, to have dinner together. Assembling the entire family around his mom’s table to devour her inimitable meatloaf had become a tradition almost carved in stone.

  Most of the time, the family attended Sunday mass together before that, since his mom was a devout Catholic who would rather reveal her tightly guarded apple pie recipe than skip mass. Though Kyle was spiritual, going to church didn’t really do anything for him, which was one of the reasons he often cited his job as an excuse for not going. Today, he could tell his mom he’d had a long, demanding shift again, and it wasn’t even a lie. So he was easily able to skip the long, drawn-out service and instead took care of his laundry, which was really urgent. After all, it’d been days since he’d been able to find a single pair of matching socks.