The Playboy Doctor Claims His Bride by Janice Lynn

Author:Janice Lynn [Janice Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781460376799
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE clinic was swamped with gastrointestinal disorders. Some real. Some imagined. A bad shipment of tomatoes had hit the supermarkets and the media was having a sensationalist field day with it as nothing else newsworthy was going on.

Over the past few days, the number of cases had slowed, but the clinic remained busy. So did Kasey. With preparations for the fund-raiser and with Eric.

She worried about what she saw as their inevitable breakup, but she wasn’t a coward. She’d take each day, enjoy her time with him and deal with whatever the future held.

“Dr. Carmichael?” Lora poked her head into the exam room where Kasey was finishing entering prescriptions for a forty-five-year-old’s seizure medications. “Sorry to interrupt, but I just put an acute abdomen in room four.”

Another food poisoning?

“I’ll be right there.” Kasey smiled at the epileptic patient, handed him his billing sheet and followed Lora. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Oliver is in room four.”

“With abdominal pain?” Poor Mr. Oliver. She hoped he hadn’t gotten the stomach bug.

Lora nodded. “Dr. Matthews is in with him, but he asked to see you. Dr. Matthews told me to get you.”

Dr. Matthews. Eric. Kasey’s heart flip-flopped in her chest.

“Thanks,” Kasey told Lora.

She knocked on the door, pasted a smile on her face and entered the exam room. Kasey’s gaze touched on Eric, her heart beating faster as it always did when she saw him, before turning her full attention to the older gentleman lying on the exam table. “Hi, Mr. Oliver, what’s going on?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out from you.” He winced every time Eric pressed on his abdomen.

“When did your stomach start hurting? You were in the office a few weeks ago about your lower back. Was your stomach hurting then?”

“Not really.” He didn’t sound convincing.

“Not really? What does that mean?”

“It means it was bothering me, but not bad enough to mention.”

“When did it get bad enough to bring you in? This morning?”

“I got to hurting last night. Threw up several times. Nasty bile-looking stuff. Thought I was going to have to go to the emergency room. I took extra of my back medicine. The pain eased up enough to hold off. This morning I tried going to work, but the vomiting started again. Joe drove me here.” He placed his hands over his abdomen in response to Eric’s palpations. “That hurts.”

“Right there?” Eric asked, pressing over the man’s upper right quadrant.

Mr. Oliver nodded. “Like a knife is cutting into me straight through to my shoulder blade.”

Eric pressed deeper, pushing his fingertips slightly up under the edge of Mr. Oliver’s rib cage. The man’s breath caught.

“Hard to breathe when you touch me there,” he gasped.

Eric and Kasey exchanged looks. A positive Murphy’s sign.

“Have you ever had any abdominal surgeries, Mr. Oliver? Specifically, do you have your gallbladder?”

“I have everything God gave me,” the man claimed between winces. “Can you fix me, Doc?” His gaze went back and forth between Kasey and Eric. “’Cause I can’t work like this and I can’t afford not to work.

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