Page 1 of One Vow

1

Finn

The emergency room at Aspen Memorial Hospital was packed. The smell of blood was as potent as the antiseptic cleansers we used to clean the floor.

Doctors shouted orders.

Machines whirred and beeped.

Lives hung in the balance.

One patient after another rolled through the glass doors on gurneys or staggered through to collapse when they should’ve been on a gurney as rain pounded the windows. The rain was probably more than 40 percent responsible for such a busy night. The problem was, I couldn’t concentrate on of any the patients because I had one angry fiancée threatening all that I hold dear. Which was hardly surprising since that was how she’d managed to become my fiancée in the first place.

A nurse passed. “Dr. Makenzie, can you help with bed two?”

I held up one finger. Dr. Finn Makenzie, me, needed to see patients, not be embroiled in what had the potential to be the drama of the century. Yet I stayed in the cubicle with my fiancée because there was no telling how she would punish me for whatever I’d done to piss her off now.

I yanked the blue curtain closed as if it might muffle the sounds about to erupt from the mouth of the ever-so-steely Beth Cooper, not the sounds that raged around us. Beth stood in front of me with her cheeks flushed red under her makeup and her eyes narrowed so that all I could see were lashes and anger.

“What the hell are you talking about, Beth?” Beth and I had gone to the prestigious Glouster University together once upon a time, and somehow, ten years after graduation, she managed to track me down and blackmail me into marriage.

There were at least ten people who needed me more than she did out there, but Beth didn’t care about that, all she cared about was herself. Lacerations. Broken bones. A case of dehydration and a migraine. And whatever the hell was going on in bed two needed me to be the doctor that I was, but Beth came first.

In the grand scheme of things, a wedding I didn’t want to happen that now wouldn’t happen didn’t measure up to what the patients were going through. Truth be told, I didn’t care about said wedding. Not that it mattered to Beth. She was fierce and angry, panicked to the point of mania. In other words, a normal day for her.

“I said the reason they wouldn’t give us the license this morning is because you’re still married.” She wasn’t quite shrieking yet, but history, along with the vein throbbing in her forehead said it wouldn’t be long.

Beth Cooper was the definition of high-maintenance: weekly manicure, monthly hair appointments with Renaldo to maintain her Marilyn Monroe Platinum hair, an annual clothing budget that could purchase a nice three-bedroom in Glouster, and Botox injections from Dr. Capaldi, plastic surgeon to the stars.

“Well, that can’t be right. I signed the papers over a decade ago.” Whatever clerical genius messed this up was getting a bottle of 80-year-old whiskey from my Christmas gift list.

“Did you send them back?” She had one hip cocked and a hand clutched onto it.

“Of course, I sent them back.” I checked my watch because this conversation had gone on about three minutes longer than it should have. And the look on her face, irate red cheeks; enraged flashing eyes, and a ready-to-kill sneer, meant that unless I found a way to stop it, it wasn’t going to be ending any time soon. “Look, Beth, I have patients to see. Can we possibly talk about this later?”

“No. No. No! We can’t talk about this later!” And now she was shrieking. “You’re married to someone else! And we’re supposed to be walking down the aisle in nine days. Nine!”

She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly. I’d seen her do this before. About a hundred times already. And there was nothing I could do to stop the snowball effect of bad behavior. The cursing. The screaming. The tears. And I was powerless to stop it. “And you’re married to someone else. Do you know what that means?”

It meant we weren’t going to be able to get married. No Cooper/Makenzie wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Had she not been standing in front of me with her green eyes flashing fire and her fists clenching like the only thing keeping her from punching me was the three feet of space between us, I might have done the happy dance, or the thrilled beyond comprehension tango, or the yay I didn’t have to marry the wicked witch shuffle. But she started moving closer, and it wasn’t like I could back up.

“Okay, so we have to postpone.” Her eyes widened and her breath came in short angry huffs. “Look, it’s only a couple months. Just let me talk to Felicity, and I’ll get it straightened out.”

Not that big of a deal. A few hundred phone calls. A few lost deposits we could both afford. This was nothing more than a scheduling issue. Definitely not something worthy of the tantrum. But Beth Cooper, despite her public, always smiling persona had never met a tantrum she didn’t like.

“I need to be married. They aren’t giving my show to Zach Wembley because of his happy wife, happy life thing. Married people are trustworthy.” She hissed the words in a tone too sharp and too angry for anyone’s good. Especially mine. “I need the ratings our wedding will generate. I need this marriage. “And they’re deciding right after Christmas. We can’t wait a couple months.”

She crossed her arms and shook her head, hair sprayed so stiff it didn’t so much as shimmy. “I won’t wait.”

When I didn’t move, she shoved the bed in our little cubicle toward me, then her face fell, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “This show, the audience I’ve built over the years, it’s all I ever wanted. And I’m not going to lose out because you didn’t use correct postage. Fix this!”

I sighed because what else could I do? Nothing but a trot down the aisle was going to shut her up and keep my reputation intact. No one wanted a pervert as their doctor. And she had the powerful medium and the video to spin the story she was threatening to tell. Shit.

“What do you expect me to do, Beth? How the hell am I supposed to find someone to cover my shifts, hunt down Felicity, and get divorced in nine days?” That damned video had cost me enough already. I wasn’t going to sacrifice the reputation I’d worked so hard to build and then protect. So, by God, if marrying Beth Cooper was the only way to keep it quiet, then I’d marry her.

Her voice was smaller, less frantic than just a second ago. “I want you to fly to Maine and talk to the crazy she-bat. You tell her if she doesn’t want her sex video, which makes her look like some penis-crazy nympho, to go public, she’ll divorce you right now.”

“I don’t even know if she still lives in Maine.”