Page 153 of The Doctors Will See You Now

It was a real fucking shame Scott was such a smart guy. If he’d been stupid, it might at least have taken him a little longer to make the connection that was sure to ruin my night.

“Harlow Paige? As in the Harlow Paige from the Gossip column?” he questioned.

Goddammit…

“Yep,” my dad answered proudly. All I could think was uh-oh. “That’s my Harlow. Are you familiar with her work?”

“It’s you?” Scott’s—now glistening—eyes never left me. “I thought your name was Frances?”

How in the fuck did he know my first name?

My eyes all but bugged out of my head. My chart. “You said you weren’t going to look at my name.”

“I accidentally saw your name, you know, when I was signing off on your file,” he responded cynically. “It’s kind of a job hazard, Frances. Or should I call you Harlow? It’s kind of hard to keep up.”

“Frances is her first name, but she doesn’t go by it,” my father kindly explained for me, somehow not catching on to the underlying animosity. “She hated that name as a kid, and by the time she turned ten, she would only answer to her middle name—Harlow.” My father’s expression turned puzzled as he glanced back and forth between us. “Wait…signing off on your file? How do you two know each other?”

“We met a few weeks ago.” Scott’s mouth morphed into a cocky fucking smirk, and I wanted to strangle him. “HIPAA violations prevent me from being able to give the details, but Harlow could explain the situation that introduced us,” he added, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. “That is, if she wants to.”

Oh yeah, I’d love to tell my father a head laceration that occurred during sex was the reason I’d met Scott. What a fucking asshole.

“Oh! Did the two of you meet at the hospital?” Nicole asked innocuously. She couldn’t see the patch of thorns she was wading into for all the blinding love for her “do-gooder” son.

“Violations?” The vein in the center of my father’s forehead started to make its debut. “What is he talking about, Low?”

I sighed. “Calm down, Dad. It’s nothing to get worked up about.”

“It sounds like a big deal!” my father said on a near shout, and concern for what would happen next made my heart rate double. “Were you arrested?”

“Jesus, no,” I answered on a whisper. “You remember the stitches on my forehead?” I asked and he nodded.

“From the bicycle injury in Central Park?” he asked, and fucking Scott Shepard cleared his throat and chuckled softly to himself.

Yes, I did tell my dad a little bit of a lie about my head injury. Just a minor story about a crazy man on a bicycle who ran into me in Central Park that caused me to fall down and hit my head on a rock.

Just a tiny little white lie.

But seriously, who would tell their father the real story if they were in my shoes?

“Was he the man who was riding when you got injured, Low?” he questioned, and I internally groaned at his ironic choice in words.

The man who was riding? Good Lord, that sounded terrible. And a little too close to the actual scenario…

“No, sir,” Scott answered, and if the strain in his throat was any indication, he was one breath away from losing himself to laughter. “I was, in fact, not doing the riding when your daughter got injured.”

My father looked at me. “If he wasn’t the one riding, then how do you two know each other?”

Fucking fiddlesticks, I needed everyone to stop saying riding before I fainted from discomfort.

“He was my ER doctor, Dad,” I explained, and this time when he looked at Scott, his mouth was curved in appreciation.

“You took care of my Harlow after she got injured by that rider?”

“I sure did,” Scott answered helpfully, an amused smirk all but sewn on to his face. “I sutured her after the riding incident.”

“Who got hurt while riding, Scotty?” Nicole asked, her voice carrying a bit too nicely. Goddamn theater acoustics. I was torn between smacking Scott in the face or finding a way to dig a hole into the theater floor in order to migrate to China. Perhaps I can use my stiletto.

Apparently, as an outsider, it was hard to follow along with us as we talked in code.