Excerpt of Bedside Manner by Kelsey Roberts

Dr. Chance Landry was in his office dictating notes about the patients he had seen that morning. In spite of the tedium of his chore, he couldn’t stop smiling.

One of his patients had been his sister-in-law, Savannah. It had been his great pleasure to tell her she was carrying his brother, Seth’s, child. Savannah made him promise not to say a word. She knew that Jasper was a small town and she didn’t want some gas station attendant telling Seth first.

His very large family was getting very much larger. Earlier in the year, his oldest brother, Sam, and his wife, Callie, had welcomed a baby boy, Samuel Sheldon Landry. He was their second son. The baby was called Sheldon. No one would dare refer to the baby as Junior, in Sam and Callie’s presence -- or out.

His cousin Cade and his wife Barbara had a seven month old, Jackson Prather-Landry. Chance tensed when he thought about Jack’s birth. Apparently the boy was as impatient as his father because he had come into the world almost three months early. Luckily, the neo-natal unit in Helena was able to nurse him through those first few difficult months.

Speaking of nurses, Chance checked his watch. He had a date with a particularly fetching redheaded nurse this very evening.

He picked up another file and tried to decipher his own scripted notes. It was no wonder Valerie was always on his case. His handwriting had become atrocious in his thirty-five years on earth. He set the file aside. He’d have Val translate it for him later.

His mind conjured a picture of his assistant, Valerie Greene. She’d been with him for six years, but he really didn’t know much about her. Except that she had a killer body and an incredibly exotic face. He knew she was part Native American, which wasn’t all that uncommon in Montana. He knew she had completed medical school, and then bailed after her internship. But he didn’t know why. He knew she believed in holistic medicine and some of the tribal cures she had learned as a child.

Val’s homemade remedies were basically harmless, so he didn’t care that she often handed them out along with his traditional advice to his patients. She was a puzzle to him. He wasn’t being vain when he said she was the only woman who had never come on to him. Thanks to the wonderful Landry genes, Chance was a pretty good-looking man. Coupled with the fact that he was a doctor seemed to draw women to him without requiring much effort on his part.

And he did love women. All women. Well, all except for one. She was the reason he’d go to his grave single and without a family. Some part of him of him still felt the pain of her abandonment deeply. The other part was afraid that he would repeat her actions.

Val stuck her head in the door. Her eyes, which he noted were an incredible kaleidoscope of color that included greens, golds and browns, appeared troubled. He hoped it wasn’t an emergency walk-in.

“Is someone here?” he asked.

She shook her head as she entered the office. “Stop turning the ringer off on your phone,” she chided as if he were some delinquent child.

Funny, she was the only one in the office who spoke to him with such candor. Maybe that was why he liked having her on his staff.

“The hospital is calling, pick-up line one. You’ve got a major problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Chance asked, annoyed. The small, community hospital just outside of town often classified something as simple as a hangnail a dire emergency.

“The kind that can end your career as a doctor.”