A Heart Healed

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Blurb:

A BWWM, medical, billionaire romance book. Doctor Naomi Bennett certainly isn’t thinking about love … Not even when she meets the undeniably attractive billionaire businessman, Marc Hewitt. After all, when she is tasked to take care of his ailing brother, he is nothing but rude to her!

Falling in love with a bad boy was never on her list of priorities… Yet there’s more to Marc than she originally thought! And as they spend time together, she can’t get him out of her head!

But now that their relationship is blossoming, she finds that her career, which she has worked so hard for, is now on the line! Is she making a mistake in following her heart? Or should she end it all with Marc? Find out in this interracial medical romance novel by Charlene Dixon.

Chapter 1

Naomi

There was just something about the smell of sanitizer that never failed to irritate her nose. Yet, no matter how much she hated it, there was no escaping the excessive smell that reminded everyone of hospitals, no matter how hard they tried.

Naomi Bennett stood in front of the dispenser again for the third time in the past hour. She had a grimace on her face as she stared down the bottle of Eau de Healthcare like it was a skunk with its tail up. As much as she loathed it, there was no avoiding this stuff in her profession as a medical doctor. Yet she really wanted to not reapply it.

When asked why she had to, the usual excuse was ‘occupational habits’. No matter how she loathed the way it dried the skin on her hands out, or how much the smell of the stuff followed her like an ancient curse, it had to be done for her own well-being as well as for other patients.

“Glare at it all you like, you still have rounds to finish,” a voice snickered from behind her. She turned to see the grinning face of her best friend and colleague, Olivia Faraday, waiting for her to finish. The fair-skinned woman smiled at her sympathetically. She understood Naomi’s feelings about the stuff, but she was always there to remind her. The two of them had always tried to push each other like this from when they first met in their first year of medical school when they became roommates.

Even though they had tons of opposite opinions on things sometimes.

Naomi just let out a sigh and stuck her hands under the dispenser again, letting the automatic machine spray a new dose of that clean scent of death on her hands for her to rub in again.

“I know why we have to do this every time we have to head to a new ward, but couldn’t they make this stuff even remotely better for the senses?” Naomi complained after stepping aside and watching the other woman get another lot of sanitizer from the dispenser.

“Can’t agree with you more, but hey, it’s not the worst smell in the world.” Olivia shrugged. “Plus, it’s supposed to be for our own good so why not grin and bear it while we’re still on shift?”

She wasn’t wrong. With the amount of sick and/or injured patients they dealt with on a daily basis, even as residents, not getting sick was definitely something that she could live with. Just last week, there was a patient who had come in with a severe case of stuff shooting out of both ends, to put in plain terms, and she had lost count how many times she and the nurses were soaping their whole arms after that one. Even the memory was enough to make her nauseous at some points.

Naomi was also thankful that she kept her natural hair short enough to avoid messes. Her mother may not approve of the short curls that barely left her daughter’s head, but it was an easy to manage precautionary habit. She didn’t have the time to visit the hair salon like other black women did to apply hair relaxer or to sit and have braids done.

“How many patients do you still have to check?” Olivia asked as she straightened and tugged on the hem of her white coat, making sure she looked presentable enough for patients.

“Just a few beds left then I can head home, what’s up?”

Naomi straightened the steel stethoscope around her shoulders, making sure it didn’t tangle with the silver necklace she kept tucked under her scrubs. “Same. Just wanted to know if you wanted to catch a cab home together later.”

“Sure, I’ll let you know when I’m done.” The two shared a weak nod before they set off in different directions. Naomi’s last patients were in the ward on the first floor, which was all general cases. Someone transferring in after leaving intensive care, a few who had injuries, and the one who came in with the bad case of the stomach virus.

A number of them were already rearing to be discharged and head home, and as soon as Naomi and the attending doctor, usually her superior Dr. Adamson, gave the okay, they were allowed to go. She walked down the white painted hallways of the hospital, letting her feet lead her around and through the number of porters pushing other patients in wheelchairs and hospital beds. A few of the nurses either giving her a respectful nod or, in the case of the ones she’d made friends with as an intern, a well-mannered wave.

So much had changed from the time she started here at St. Joseph’s Hospital as an intern. She had been doing her last years of medical school with Olivia, and the pair of them had celebrated the fact that they had gotten in at the same hospital for an internship. The two of them had been a lot wilder, a lot more reckless with their decisions, and more arrogant. They had thought that they knew the answer for everything.

Those years had humbled her really fast, especially when she had gotten lost trying to find the surgical theater from the emergency unit.

At least it was safe enough to say that, after two years, she knew this building like the back of her hand unlike back when she was an intern. Now that she had become a doctor all in her own right, Naomi was more responsible once the weight of people’s lives in her hands had become a solid reality that she had to accept.

However, she sometimes still fell into the trap that Dr. Adamson often warned her about: growing too attached to her patients. She loved her job and her patients, but there were a few of them who always seemed to slip into her heart. There were a number of them who had come and gone under her care.

However, the hardest part was then saying goodbye. Whether it was the elderly lady who had passed away from late-stage breast cancer or the pregnant college dropout who she had begun to think of as a little sister after her admission for a complication with her baby, the attachments just hurt the more she thought about them and what more she could have done.

Even now, she wondered about if she could be a better doctor and how to do so.

“Dr. Bennett?” one of the nurses called from behind the nurses’ station. It was one of the few male nurses on this floor, a tall, lean boy with short hair and dark skin who couldn’t be more than a few years younger than herself. What was his name again? Naomi was sure that he had been with her for more than a few times whenever she was doing her rounds. He was a nice man, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember his name.

“Hi there…” She trailed off, trying to keep a pleasant smile on her face. Her eyes tried to scan for at least a name tag, but he didn’t seem to be wearing one on his chest.

“Are you finishing off your last rounds for the day?” he asked.

“Yeah, I am. Did you need me for something after I check on patients?”

“Can I walk with you?” Naomi really had to resist the sigh that was threatening to surface at that point. She just wanted to finish her shift and head home, but now she was having small talk. Great.

“Try to keep up then,” she said before turning and walking down towards the first hospital room. It was one of the larger ones of the ward with two beds facing each other with enough space for curtains to be drawn as well as for visitor chairs. It wasn’t full today since most of the beds were empty after this morning’s discharge cycle. Her patient, however, still had a couple of days left on his observation period before he could go home.

“Good evening, Ian,” she greeted with a theatrical smile as she walked into the room and grabbed his chart from the tray at the foot of his bed. “How are you doing this time?”

Ian pulled his gaze away from the window to look at her with a shrug. “Pretty much the same.”

“I need words here.”