My Heart My Home (Love in Madelia Book 1) Read online

  My Heart, My Home

  Love in Madelia, Volume 1

  Jessa Chase

  Published by Jessa Chase, 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  MY HEART, MY HOME

  First edition. December 23, 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 Jessa Chase.

  Written by Jessa Chase.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue | One year later...

  Chapter One

  About the Author

  For Kenny, my muse, my best friend.

  Chapter One

  KATE

  It had been a long, grueling nightshift at Mercy Medical Center’s emergency room. Or rather, emergency department, Doctor Kate Jacobson reminded herself with a rueful smile. It was all part of a whole attempt to revamp the aging hospital.

  Step one, start calling it a “medical center” because some bigwigs with degrees in public relations had determined that people prefer it to the word “hospital”. Step two, out with the emergency room mentality, in with the Emergency Department.

  No longer were physicians the lords and masters of this domain; rather they found themselves simply another cog in the medical center wheel. Kate had to admit that most of the changes had been for the better. They now had new exam beds, separate treatment areas dedicated for initial triage, trauma situations, and even an infectious disease room with positive ventilation to prevent accidental transmissions. So far she’d only seen it used for the occasional MRSA case on a homeless person, but they were prepared for much more.

  “Doctor Jacobson,” a nurse approached her with a clipboard and a grim look. “Bed 2 is still having a lot of nausea. Nothing’s come up yet, but it looks pretty likely.”

  Kate took the clipboard from the nurse and scribbled some orders along the bottom. “Push Zofran please, and thank you for letting me know.”

  “Right away. I’ll keep you updated.” The nurse spun on her heels and dashed toward the in-house pharmacy to retrieve the medication. Kate watched her for a moment before turning back to the growing stack of charts in front of her that needed to be signed off.

  “Might as well while it’s-”

  “Don’t say it,” a fellow attending, his white coat sliding haphazardly off his shoulders, slid up beside her and raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t even think it.”

  Before she could say anything, the double doors of the emergency department banged open wide, followed quickly by a stretcher and two paramedics.

  “Shit,” the attending uttered, “you thought it didn’t you.”

  Kate simply nodded as the two of them hustled over to their newest patient.

  An hour and two full resuscitations later, and Kate was able to successfully transfer the patient to the ICU for the night. The man was young, barely out of high school, but he’d had enough alcohol and other drugs in his system to fell a small elephant. He’d been driving on the wrong side of the road for quite some time, according to the police, before an oncoming semi-truck was unable to swerve in time and took him on head-first. Although he’d been wearing a seatbelt, it hadn’t done him much good when he found the front of a semi-truck in his lap.

  Kate washed up in the physician’s lounge and took a deep breath, looking at herself in the mirror for the first time all shift. It wasn’t great what she saw looking back at her. She still had good skin and youthful features, but the dark circles under her eyes and the fly away hairs that surrounded her face like a halo did nothing for her appearance. Kate had always pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail, figuring it to be the best hairstyle for her work life and requiring the least amount of prep time.

  As she looked at herself now, though, Kate pondered if she should do something more for her appearance. She had never really been a makeup kind of person, except for a few futile attempts in high school. Maybe some eyeliner, or maybe foundation would take away those dark circles?

  “Staring at yourself in the mirror, Jacobson?” the attending, Doctor Jonathan Helling, entered the lounge with a loud THWAK! of the door. He and Kate had started their internships together and had continued on with Mercy as attendings.

  They had bonded over stale coffee and intense traumas, and Kate was always happy to have a shift with him. It certainly didn’t hurt to have someone as blatantly attractive as him around during the slower shifts, and he was a damn good doctor to have nearby when the shit really hit the fan.

  “You know me, Helling. All vanity, all the time.”

  He chuckled and approached her from behind. Theirs had been an easy intimacy, which had made the subtle shift from coworkers to friends as simple as breathing.

  Helling tugged at Kate’s ponytail, releasing her curly brown locks from the hair tie and letting them fall free against her shoulders.

  “You really are quite gorgeous, you know,” he said as he propped his chin on her shoulder. Kate blushed and could not maintain eye contact with him in the mirror.

  “I’m really quite gullible, you mean,” Kate responded. “And so not your type.”

  Helling faked a look of shock, but his boyish good looks could not maintain it for long. “Why, I never,” he responded, before giving in to another grin. “You are, however, exactly the type of wonderful, selfless, utterly magnificent type who would be willing to take on my Friday shift next week. That’s my type to a T.”

  Kate laughed and turned around to face Jonathan. “What you mean is I’m the type who wouldn’t have anything better to do but work an extra shift, while you go out and have a ridiculous amount of fun at my expense.”

  “I would never say it like that, but, yes.” Helling smiled again, poking Kate in the ribs until she agreed to take his shift. He wasn’t wrong in his assessment; Kate didn’t have any sort of social life to speak of and she very often volunteered to take other doctor’s shifts when they had pressing matters to attend to.

  That didn’t mean she had to make it easy for her friend.

  “What terribly important engagement would you be missing out on if I said no?”

  “Would you believe a once-in-a-lifetime first date opportunity with potentially the love of my life?”

  “I would, if you didn’t have one of those every other week.”

  Helling narrowed his eyes at her in mock annoyance. “I’m serious this time. He just might be the future Mr. Helling. The bearer of my future children. My all. My everything.”

  “How exactly are you planning on him bearing your future children?”

  “Oh, well, I happen to know this girl, she’d be a perfect surrogate. She’s the most wonderful, selfless, utterly magnificent type of girl...”

  Kate laughed heartily as she exited the physician’s lounge and headed back out to the pit, Jonathan still extoling her virtues and sucking up to her along the way.

  It wasn’t long before another case came through the door. This one wasn’t brought be ambulance, instead he ambled in on his own. The man looked to be about 60 years old, although Kate mused that he could be as young as 40 as the hard life on the streets had aged him. His name was Andrew Lassiter, and he desperately needed his left foot looked at.

  A
s the triage nurse directed the man to their main triage section, Kate gloved up and opened the man’s chart. He had been to the department more than once before, although Kate had never seen him personally. He was indeed 45 years old, in reasonably good health for being homeless, but addicted to pain killers and trying desperately to get them from any hospital or clinic he could walk to.

  “Mr. Lassiter, I hear your foot is giving you some trouble.” Kate entered the triage room and saw the man sitting on the exam table. The nurse had extended the foot rest and laid his left foot horizontal to his body, and removed his tattered old boot and filthy sock.

  It had been a long time since Kate had felt shocked by anything she saw at work, but the combination of the smell and the sight of this man’s rotting foot was enough to make her pause for a moment. She approached his foot slowly, assessing as she went. His chart had mentioned chronic diabetes, along with many of its accompanying symptomology, but nothing had been dictated about peripheral nerve damage.

  “Hurts like a motherfucker,” Mr. Lassiter said, “excuse the language miss.”

  “I’m Doctor Jacobson, sir, can you tell me how long this has been going on?”

  “I don’t know. A week?” He adjusted himself on the exam table, making the smell from his foot rise up into Kate’s nostrils again. She clamped her hand down on the exam table to steady herself.

  “I’m going to get the nurse to clean this up for you, and we’ll apply some antibiotic ointment and bandages to it as well. I’d like you to come back daily for the next week so we can change them out for you. Can you do that?”

  Mr. Lassiter waved his hand at her dismissively. “Ah, nah, that’s not going to happen. Just give me a script for something, make it not hurt no more. It’ll go away on it’s own. It always has.”

  “Mr. Lassiter, I’m afraid your foot is quite infected. I’m not even sure narcotic pain relievers would help at this point. What you really need is a good strong antibiotic and to keep the area clean.”

  “Bullshit!” the man pushed himself off the exam table and came at her. “What I need is some goddamn pain pills!”

  Kate stepped back, but wasn’t quick enough. The man deftly pulled a small gun from the folds of his coat and held it inches from her face. She stopped moving, nearly stopped breathing.

  “Oh-okay Mr. Lassiter. Let me figure something out, okay? I can help you.”

  “You can help me, sure. Write me a prescription and I’ll be on my way.”

  Kate nodded meekly. It went against everything she believed in as a doctor, but if writing the man a narcotic prescription got him out of her department with no one getting hurt, she damn well was going to do it. She could always call the police after he had left and let them know it was written under duress and that they should be on the look out for him.

  Kate motioned toward her coat pocket, where she kept her prescription pad. “I’m just going to pull out my pad now.” She removed the blue paper pad slowly from her pocket, still very aware of the cold steel muzzle pressed against her forehead.

  “I...I need a pen.” She had left her pen in her pocket, hoping to be able to stall the angry man. Kate motioned toward the counter against the wall, where there were several pens. “Can I get one of those?”

  Mr. Lassiter nodded and pulled the gun away from her. She sighed in relief, and made her way over to the counter.

  “Kate, dear-”

  In an instant, Kate saw Jonathan enter the triage room. She saw the gunman turn, she saw him raise the gun and pull the trigger. In an instant, she saw her friend clutch his bloody chest and fall to the ground.

  In an instant, her world became a blur of screams, of the bitterness of gunpowder in the air and the breaking of her heart.

  LOGAN

  Logan McAllister wiped the combined dust and sweat from his brow with a faded red handkerchief, before shoving it back in his back pocket. He had been working through the hottest part of the day, in the extremely under ventilated attic of his newest project, the old Weaver place.

  It hadn’t always been called that, of course, but it was the way of small towns like Madelia that houses retained the names of their previous owners long after the owners themselves had stopped living there. The Weaver family had been one of the wealthiest families in Madelia before they’d pulled up roots and moved away. What had once been a beautiful stately manor had given into old age and was merely a shell of its former self.

  Logan had a mind to change all that, and he was relying on his sheer stubbornness to get him through it.

  He had started on the inside of the house, tearing out just about everything that hadn’t originally come with the home. He had refinished the wood floors to their former glory, sanded down years of god-awful wallpapers and paint to get to the original state of the walls, and added a warm white base to most of the walls. He had plans to revitalize the kitchen with custom cabinets and gleaming new appliances, but all of his plans were for nothing if he couldn’t get the ventilation in the attic to comply with code.

  Decades ago the attic had fallen into disrepair, so much so that mold and other infestations had taken root and grown magnificently. Logan had done away with those beasts first off, and now he was adding a new upgraded ventilation system to prevent it from happening again. It was dirty, grimy, sweaty work, and he loved every damn minute of it.

  “Logan! You up there?” a shout from below made Logan bang his head on the rafter above him. The string of cuss words that exploded from him made his visitor cackle. A moment later, Logan’s younger brother Daniel popped his head up into the attic space.

  “Place looks like shit. Project of the year is turning into project of the decade, huh?” Daniel quipped, noticeably careful about not resting against any of the surfaces. Daniel was in his dress-blues, a sight that continued to give Logan pains in his heart he was sure resembled pride.

  Logan rubbed the growing goose egg on the back of his head and grimaced. “Not for long. Just about finished here.”

  Daniel looked around, dubiously. “Seriously? Like, actually finished for real?”

  Logan pulled out his filthy handkerchief and tossed it at his brother. “For real. Like, actually.”

  “Ha! Well, when you finish here, how about you get your ass in the truck and drive me to the airport before I get arrested for being AWOL?”

  By the time Logan returned from the airport, the sun had dipped below the horizon and even he had to admit his workday was over. Instead of driving back to the old Weaver place, he instead headed back to his own house, a well worn ramshackle of a place on the edge of town. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside looking in, but Logan had done everything in his power to make the inside as perfect as possible. From the state-of-the-art television and speaker system in his “man cave” to the kitchen that would make a professional chef sell his first-born child, Logan had taken great care with selecting everything that went into his home.

  He hadn’t done much with the outside yet, so the paint continued to peel off the front porch and the clumps of dandelions beat out the grass on his front lawn. Logan slipped inside and grabbed an ice cold beer from his fridge and made his way back out to that dilapidated front porch. It might not look like much, Logan mused as he flopped into his well-worn porch chair, but those lumpy cushions with their faded yellow sunflower pattern were exactly what he needed after a long day of backbreaking labor.

  Logan sipped from his beer bottle and watched as the sun faded away in the distance. He looked out toward the center of his small town, and smiled. He had worked hard to make his place in this town, and he’d really finally made it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was his.

  KATE

  Kate shoved the last of her bags into the trunk of the yellow taxi and stepped back to get into the back seat. The driver had been more than thrilled to take her the 35 miles from the airport to the tiny town of Madelia, but he hadn’t seen inclined to help at all with her bags. It didn’t help that Kate had brought basically everythin
g she owned in her two oversized pieces of luggage. She hadn’t had a clue what she might need, might not need, and in the end she had thrown away much more of her life than she had packed.

  Her therapist assured her that everything she had gone through was perfectly normal, in that calm, sure way that therapists talked that drove Kate completely crazy. People who had been through trauma often found themselves unable to cope with their surroundings, the woman had said. Although this was all very normal, the therapist hadn’t been thrilled to hear Kate had taken a job across the country, in Madelia. She called it running away, but to Kate it was simply a new path. A different place to be.

  As the taxi pulled away from the airport and headed toward Madelia, however, Kate started to have serious reservations. She started to remember her childhood, the life that she had so desperately tried to get away from by moving out of state for college, and even further away for medical school and work.

  Memories flashed across her consciousness as the bright lights of the city dimmed and the road turned to gravel. Madelia was a small town by anyone’s standards. At any one time there might be 300 residents, and most of them were farming families who lived on the very edges of the town proper. It was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone’s business, whether they wanted it known or not.

  This hadn’t kept Kate’s family from being able to keep their secrets, however. Being part of one of the founding families of Madelia helped; the town elders weren’t as nosey with them as they were with the “new” families. Kate wished more than once that they had been. Maybe growing up wouldn’t have been so hellish if she’d had someone on the outside looking out for her.

  “We’re here, Miss.” The taxi driver pulled to a stop in front of a small clinic in the middle of the town.

  It didn’t look like much, in fact the word “tired” came to mind as Kate removed her bags from the trunk of the taxi and hobbled toward the front door. Mayor Stacy Johanson had sounded positively jubilant when Kate had answered the wanted ad for the town physician. Kate hadn’t been in the position to negotiate her terms; she had simply accepted the job and the Mayor had mailed her the keys to the clinic.