MARRIED TO MY RIVAL DOCTOR

chapter two

Rival Ground

Emily

Thursday arrived exactly as fast as I'd dreaded and dressed exactly as unglamorously as I'd hoped, scrubs, hair scraped back, not a trace of makeup, because if I was going to spend my morning playing assistant to some overhyped cardiologist, I intended to look thoroughly uninterested in impressing him.

The outreach site had transformed the town square into something almost unrecognizable, white tents, folding tables stacked with supplies, a line of townspeople already curling around the fountain before eight in the morning.

"Popular guy," I muttered.

"Told you," Grandma said, entirely too smug for someone leaning on a cane.

I spotted him before she pointed him out, which annoyed me more than it should have. He wasn't hard to find. He moved through the chaos like it belonged to him, calm where everyone else was frantic, correcting a supply table's setup with two words and a look, checking a chart before the nurse holding it had finished explaining it to him.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Insufferably composed.

"That's him," Grandma said, unnecessarily.

"I gathered."

"He's even better looking up close."

"Grandma."

"I'm old, not blind."

I steered her toward an empty chair near one of the tables, fully intending to sit her down, hand her off to literally any other qualified doctor on-site, and disappear toward the supply tent until this entire ordeal was over.

She had other plans.

"Dr. Hernandez!" she called, waving her cane like a flag, loud enough that half the square turned to look.

"Grandma, no—"

Too late. He was already crossing toward us, and up close, the effect was somehow worse. Sharp eyes. The kind of face that knew exactly how it looked and had stopped being humble about it years ago.

"Mrs. Whitney." His voice was low, warm in a way that felt calculated rather than accidental. "I was hoping you'd come by."

"Wouldn't miss it. This is my granddaughter, Emily. She's a doctor too, you know. OB-GYN. Very accomplished." She said it like she was reading off a résumé she'd personally written.

His gaze shifted to me, and something in it sharpened, assessing, curious in a way I immediately resented.

"Emily," he repeated, like he was testing the shape of it. "I didn't realize Mrs. Whitney had family in medicine."

"I didn't realize free clinics came with this much fanfare," I said flatly.

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough to be irritating.

"Fanfare tends to follow when the alternative is people not receiving care they need. I'll take fanfare."

"How noble."

"You say that like it's an insult."

"I say it like I'm reserving judgment."

Grandma, watching this entire exchange with the delight of a woman watching her favorite soap opera unfold live, chose that exact moment to announce she needed her blood pressure checked and promptly abandoned me to fetch "the good cuff" from the supply tent, leaving me alone with a man I had explicitly, deliberately, sworn no interest in meeting.

"She does this," I said, mostly to fill the silence.

"Sets people up?"

"Relentlessly."

"I don't mind." He said it simply, without the smugness I'd braced for. "Mrs. Whitney has always had excellent instincts."

"She has excellent meddling. There's a difference."

That almost-smile again. I was starting to hate how often it appeared.

A nurse jogged over before I could excuse myself, clipboard clutched to her chest. "Dr. Hernandez, we've got a pregnant patient with heart palpitations and shortness of breath. Twenty-six weeks. Her vitals are borderline."

Seth was already moving. "Get her to the exam tent."

I fell into step beside him without deciding to, old instinct overriding irritation the moment a patient was involved.

"I'm coming."

He glanced at me, surprised. "This is cardiac."

"She's twenty-six weeks pregnant. That makes it obstetric too, whether you want the company or not."

Inside the tent, the patient, pale, breathing fast, one hand pressed protectively over her belly, looked between us with the particular fear of someone who'd rather not be the center of two doctors' attention at once.

Seth listened to her heart, jaw tightening. "Possible SVT. I want to start with vagal maneuvers, and if that doesn't convert her, we consider adenosine."

"Absolutely not, not without fetal monitoring first." I moved to the patient's other side. "Adenosine crosses minimally, but I'm not pushing anything into her system before I know how that baby's tolerating this. We have zero monitoring equipment out here."

"She's symptomatic now, Dr. DelaRosa. I don't have the luxury of waiting for equipment we don't have."

"And I don't have the luxury of explaining to this woman why we prioritized her heart rhythm over her child's safety when a field hospital wasn't equipped to catch a complication." I kept my voice level, professional, even as something sharper simmered underneath it. "Vagal maneuvers first. Full stop. If those fail, we transport her to the nearest facility with monitoring before we touch medication."

For a moment, he just looked at me, something assessing and faintly startled behind the irritation.

"Fine," he said finally. "Vagal maneuvers first."

It worked. Ten minutes of coached breathing and cold compresses later, her heart rate settled, her color returned, and the fear in her eyes eased into something closer to relief.

Seth didn't apologize, and I didn't expect him to. But as the patient was walked out to rest, he studied me with an expression I couldn't quite place.

"You're not wrong very often, are you."

"No," I said. "I'm really not."

"I'll remember that."

"Please do."

I turned to escape toward the supply tent myself, already composing the excuse I'd give Grandma when I returned without her blood pressure cuff, and caught my foot directly on a tent stake half-buried in the grass.

The ground rushed up. I had exactly enough time to register the humiliation waiting for me before an arm caught me hard around the waist, stopping my fall entirely, hauling me back upright against a solid chest that smelled, absurdly, like cedar and antiseptic.

"Careful," Seth said, close enough that I felt the word more than heard it.

I shoved back from him the moment my balance returned, heat crawling up my neck for entirely the wrong reasons.

"I had it handled."

"You were three inches from a concussion."

"I had it handled," I repeated, with considerably less conviction.

His eyes held mine a beat too long, something unreadable flickering behind them before the composed mask slid back into place.

"Watch your step, Dr. DelaRosa." He said my name like he already knew exactly how much it would bother me that he had it memorized within thirty seconds of meeting me. "I'd rather not add you to today's patient list."

He walked away before I could think of a response sharp enough to satisfy me.

Grandma reappeared moments later, blood pressure cuff in hand, took one look at my face, and smiled like Christmas had come early.

"I saw that," she said.

"Saw nothing."

"He caught you."

"He was standing nearby."

"Emily."

"Common grandma!."

But even as I said it, I could still feel the ghost of his arm around my waist, and I hated, more than anything else that morning, how long it took that feeling to fade.