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  Deliver Me

  (Silver Oak Medical Center Book 1)

  Aiden Bates

  Cover Designed by Duong Covers

  Important information…

  This book, “Deliver Me” is the first book in the Silver Oak Medical Center. However, this book and every other book in the series can be read as a stand-alone. Thus, it is not required to read the first book to understand the second (as so on). Each book can be read by itself.

  Table of Contents

  Important information…

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Deliver Me – Bonus Chapter

  Preview Chapter: Daring the Devil

  The story may be over but

  Chapter One

  Carter stood outside the exam room and gripped his tablet. He hated these types of conversations. Hating them didn't make them any less necessary, of course, but he hated them nevertheless. There was no way for them to go well. Either he gave too much information and scared the crap out of his patients, or he gave too little information and scared the crap out of his patients. Either way, the patients went away angry and frightened, and his was the face associated with bad news.

  Oh well. That was what they paid him for, after all.

  He knocked on the door, gave the people inside a moment to collect themselves, and then let himself in. "Mr. and Mrs. Cecil, I presume?" He held out a hand to both parents-to-be. "I'm Dr. Idoni. I'm pleased to meet you. Make yourselves comfortable. This is your first child, am I right?"

  Mrs. Cecil nodded, while her husband frowned. "We went over all of this with the nurse."

  "I know. I know. I just don't like to assume that everything I'm reading is what was said." He shrugged. He was stalling, and he knew it, but he couldn't help himself. "Sometimes things get transcribed wrong. I'd rather get things right, you know? Anyway. You just had your first ultrasound. It's a little later than we usually expect them, but that's actually a good thing in this case."

  The couple exchanged glances. "Why is that?" the wife asked. She placed a hand over her abdomen, even though she wasn't really showing yet. Her jeans were a little tight, and Carter knew what he was looking for, but most casual observers might think she'd just gained a little bit of weight.

  "Well, it's because if we'd done the scan at eight weeks, we would have missed something. It might be nothing, and it might be important." He sighed and logged into his tablet. All that it took were a few taps and he was able to bring up the image he wanted. "Do you see this bit right here? See how it's translucent? That's a red flag. It's called nuchal translucency." He swallowed and wiped his palm against his white coat.

  "What does that even mean?" The husband scowled and took off his red baseball cap.

  Carter tugged at his sleeves. "Sometimes it means nothing. It can indicate a congenital heart defect. It can also indicate certain chromosomal abnormalities, but those are extremely rare. What we usually do, when we see an ultrasound like this, is schedule a fetal echocardiogram. That will clear up at least one issue for us, one that we can look at and prepare for now. If your baby does turn out to have a heart defect, the fetal echocardiogram will clue us in on how severe a defect we're talking about and help us come up with a treatment plan."

  Mrs. Cecil covered her mouth with both hands. "A heart defect?"

  Damn it. There was the terror. "We always hope that it's one of the false positives, Mrs. Cecil. And sometimes that does turn out to be the case. It's like in your house, right? You take a look around to see if anything's out of place. When you see that something's not quite where you left it, you take a closer look. Sometimes you just didn't leave it where you think you did, or else a window got left open and the curtain pushed it out of the way. Other times, sure. It's something you have to look into. Maybe someone's been in the house. You don't know, so you have to look a little closer. That's what the fetal echocardiogram is for." He took a deep breath. "And, of course, there's the amniocentesis. That can't be done for another few weeks, and I'd like to talk to you about your risk factors for some of the chromosomal abnormalities before we get into performing a test like that. The fetal echocardiogram is extremely low risk, whereas the amniocentesis is still low risk but does carry some risk of miscarriage."

  Mr. Cecil scowled. "Look, I don't know if our insurance will cover that. I'd have to call and stuff."

  Carter nodded. He heard that a lot, and he sure wasn't going to judge this guy for the hesitation. "I hear you. I'll be honest. I don't know how much it would be, out of pocket. They don't tell us. We're supposed to guide our patients based on what's right from a purely medical standpoint." He didn't bother to hide the bitterness in his smirk. "I think we should have all of the information available for you, but it's not really my call. But anyway. What I can tell you is that Silver Oak has an office set up specifically to help people find options. So what I would recommend, and you don't have to take my advice but you know, I did study this for a long time, would be that you go ahead and set up the appointment. Talk to your insurance company, and then talk to the payment office. We'll see what happens from there."

  Cecil nodded, his eyes far away. His lips were still pressed together, giving him more wrinkles than he should have had at his age, but he'd given up some of the resentment. Maybe it had just been the fact that Carter let a little bit of his accent show through. Funny; he'd never thought that being from Tennessee would be at all useful in New York, but here he was. "We'll see what happens, I guess."

  Mrs. Cecil got down from the exam table, and the pair headed out to make their appointment. Carter pressed the necessary buttons on the tablet to authorize the appointment, and that was the end of it. At least, that was the end of it from his side of things, until the next appointment anyway.

  He headed back toward his office to make the necessary notes in Mrs. Cecil's patient files, but Allen grabbed him on his way past. Allen wasn't a doctor, he was a nurse practitioner. He worked exclusively on omegas, like himself. Like Carter, too. "Where you going, Doc?" Allen asked. He put a hand on Carter's arm.

  "Back to my office?" Carter tipped his head to the side. "Like I usually do between appointments?"

  "No. Did you forget? We've got that lunch meeting with the new management team." Allen crossed his arm over his chest. "Don't tell me you were going to skip it."

  Carter rolled his eyes. "Oh come on. I'm not an accountant. I'm not in HR. I deal with obstetrics, gynecology, and omega-specific medicine. I'm not useful in a business meeting. Putting me in there would be like putting an over-caffeinated toddler into a room full of elderly nuns with a box full of firecrackers and a book of matches."

  Allen lifted his eyebrows. "You do have such a way with words. Fortunately firecrackers are illegal in New York, and attendance is mandatory." H
e linked his arm through Carter's. "Come on now. At least they're feeding us lunch."

  "Okay but the lunch comes from the cafeteria, Allen. No one wants to eat food that comes from the cafeteria." Carter followed along, mostly because it would create a scene to fight back too hard. "And attendance is mandatory or what? What's the consequence of staying back and doing the job we get paid for?" He shook his head.

  "I don't know, but these guys are wearing, like, really nice dark suits, and that makes me nervous. Can we maybe not find out what the or else thing is until they've fed us?" Allen pulled him into the largest conference room that the floor had and gestured to the back, where a table had been set up with boxed lunches for all.

  Carter bristled. What if someone didn't want the box lunch? What if they were vegetarian, or Muslim, or had a food allergy?

  "I see that look on your face." Allen elbowed Carter in the ribs and shoved a box lunch into his hands. "Take your burrito and sit down."

  They found a seat in the middle of the room and tucked into their lunches while they waited for the presentation to begin.

  The faces at the front of the room were new, but none of them were unexpected. They were older white men, dressed in suits that could only be differentiated by the tie. They pursed their lips together and scowled at the people who worked in Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Omega Medicine. They scowled even deeper as the room got more crowded. "I don't like the looks of this," Allen whispered. "They're doing a head count."

  "I'm not surprised," Carter told him. "Look at their ties. They have no souls."

  Allen snickered, drawing more scowls from the suits.

  After ten minutes, a younger man strode into the office. This one also wore a suit, but his suit was light gray and double breasted. The dress shirt underneath was a kind of very fine gingham, with a bold brown tie that dripped money. He had a lean and hungry look to him, one that he took care to emphasize with a neatly trimmed beard that highlighted his high cheekbones.

  Ice blue eyes stared straight ahead as he stormed up to the front of the room and took his place at the center of the table. Carter caught a whiff of leather as he passed, and it wasn't from anything that the guy was wearing. The fashion victim, whoever he might be, smelled amazing. Carter thought about snowdrifts and tried to remember that this guy had been brought in to make Silver Oak over into a corporate unit.

  "Hot damn," Allen whispered into Carter's ear.

  Carter's body agreed with Allen. He met the executive's eyes and wondered what it might be like to have a few less people in the room. Then again, Carter wasn't exactly in the market for a partner. He delivered babies. He didn't make them. "Are you kidding me?" he whispered back. "Did you see that suit?"

  "It will look lovely on the floor." Allen nudged Carter with his shoulder.

  The icy alpha stood up, and all conversations came to an abrupt halt. "Good afternoon. My name is Finn Riley, and I'm the new Chief Executive Officer here at Silver Oak. As you're all aware, Silver Oak joined the Regent Healthcare Alliance last month. Part of my job is to bring Silver Oak into the Regent family."

  The lights dimmed, but didn't completely darken. "I'm sure you're all wondering, What does this mean for me?"

  Carter frowned and glanced around at the rest of his colleagues. They were all looking at each other, too, and not with approval. Sure, the self would intrude, but none of them had gone into healthcare because they thought about themselves first. They worried about their patients first. Their prior CEO had understood that.

  Images appeared on a screen. Carter hadn't noticed the screen behind Riley, but now he did. He noticed it because of the graphs that were on it. The graphs that were on the screen showed expenses rising, year over year. There was no corresponding graph for income, or for patient outcomes. Carter pressed his lips together and crossed his arms over his chest.

  "As you can see, the hospital's expenses have been rising year over year for the past ten years. This is especially concerning given the current environment. Obviously, Regent would prefer to keep their employees fully employed, but we need to cut back on the waste. Overtime, shown here in red, is one of the most egregious expenses we have, and it's especially overblown in your department as you can see here."

  Carter raised his hand.

  Riley narrowed his eyes. "What is it?"

  "Dr. Idoni." Carter stood up and met the alpha's eyes. "I noticed that there's no corresponding graph that shows patient outcomes over the same period. I have one on my laptop, in my office, that I would be happy to send you. It shows parental mortality rates declining by over twenty percent and paternal mortality rates, in cases of parturient omegas, declining by more than fifty percent. Maybe that would provide some context to your graph."

  A murmur ran through the crowd, and a few of the nurses nodded their heads.

  "I don't see how that's relevant to expenses." Riley's voice dripped venom.

  "It's relevant in that more is being spent to ensure that these patients, who would otherwise have died, survive. That is what we actually do here. When you take our department to task for overtime, I also notice that you don't take the seasons into account. Fortunately, I happen to have a breakdown of exactly that on my laptop as well."

  "Why do you even have that?" asked a balding man with a pink tie.

  "Because something we were doing, as a department, before the merger, was addressing quality of life issues within the department. Something that we found was that we tend to incur overtime costs in the winter, for two reasons. One is weather related. If the next shift can't get to the hospital, the earlier shift has to stay on, and they have to be paid. There are laws about that. Lots of laws about that," he added, with a grim smile. "The other issue is cold and flu season. Our staff, and our nursing staff in particular, are dealing with a highly vulnerable population. Half of our patients do not have functioning immune systems yet. They cannot come to work if they are sick. Their colleagues pick up the slack, which also causes overtime."

  Riley's face went white with rage, and he gripped the podium so hard that it cracked. "We can discuss these issues at a later point. Nevertheless, we need for all employees to be extra conscious of expenses and of costs as they go about their daily tasks.

  "I'm sure that there will be many changes as the merger is completed. Any transaction of this nature tends to involve some culture shock; behaviors that were tolerated by one administration may not be welcome in the next." He met Carter's eyes, and his threat was clear. "Enjoy your day." He stormed out of the room, ridiculous jacket flowing behind him.

  Allen turned his head to look at Carter, his face ashen. "Dude. You just challenged the new CEO, in public. I don't get the sense that he's used to being challenged. Your ass is grass around here."

  Carter did not want to think about Riley and his ass in the same context. Maybe someone who looked like Riley, and who smelled like Riley, but the man himself was an ass. He curled his lip. "I'm the only one in the next three counties who's licensed to do a C-section on an omega." He grimaced. "That's why I said it, instead of expecting someone else to do it. I've got job security."

  "He can make you quit, and then what would you do?" Allen shook his head. "Don't poke the bear with a stick, okay?"

  Carter headed back to his office. Lord, what a day this was turning out to be. When he'd gotten to work this morning, he'd been looking forward to a fairly routine day of simply hanging around and working with parents-to-be. Now he had a case with a possible serious birth defect and a budding war with the hospital's new CEO.

  The hot CEO.

  Allen stuck his head into the room. "Don't get comfortable. We just got an omega in from Emergency, no prenatal care and he's having a rough time. It looks like he's going to need you."

  Carter chugged down the cold remains of his coffee. It looked like it was going to be a long night. Fortunately for him, and for Finn Riley's hideous graphs, he wasn't paid by the hour.

  ***

  Finn burned with rage after
he left the introductory meeting. He'd intended—no, he'd needed—to impress his new employees with his authority. He'd walked right in and things had been going well, until he met that doctor's eyes. Those chestnut brown eyes that just stared back. They didn't look away, they didn't give way, they didn't submit.

  Dr. Idoni had smelled like wood smoke, and it had been heavenly. Finn hadn't had the chance to do more than catch a quick waft of his scent as he passed, but he'd picked up enough to make his mouth water. The man was handsome, and he smelled amazing.

  Too bad the personality was more "firebrand' than "campfire."

  The obnoxious doctor had a damn fine track record, too. Finn scoured his file, looking for anything that he could use to fire the man for, but there was nothing. He'd taken the job at Silver Oak once he'd finished his residency, because there weren't enough obstetricians in Syracuse and there weren't nearly enough obstetricians who were certified to handle the number of omegas living in Central and Northern New York.

  He'd agreed to work there for two years, to pay off the rest of his schooling. He was still here, years later.