Fierce-Sam (Fierce Family Series Book 1) Read online

  Copyright 2019 Natalie Ann

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without a written consent.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Road Series-See where it all started!!

  Lucas and Brooke’s Story- Road to Recovery

  Jack and Cori’s Story – Road to Redemption

  Mac and Beth’s Story- Road to Reality

  Ryan and Kaitlin’s Story- Road to Reason

  The All Series

  William and Isabel’s Story — All for Love

  Ben and Presley’s Story – All or Nothing

  Phil and Sophia’s Story – All of Me

  Alec and Brynn’s Story – All the Way

  Sean and Carly’s Story — All I Want

  Drew and Jordyn’s Story— All My Love

  Finn and Olivia’s Story—All About You

  The Lake Placid Series

  Nick Buchanan and Mallory Denning – Second Chance

  Max Hamilton and Quinn Baker – Give Me A Chance

  Caleb Ryder and Celeste McGuire – Our Chance

  Cole McGuire and Rene Buchanan – Take A Chance

  Zach Monroe and Amber Deacon- Deserve A Chance

  Trevor Miles and Riley Hamilton – Last Chance

  Matt Winters and Dena Hall- Another Chance

  The Fierce Five Series

  Gavin Fierce and Jolene O’Malley- How Gavin Stole Christmas

  Brody Fierce and Aimee Reed - Brody

  Aiden Fierce and Nic Moretti- Aiden

  Mason Fierce and Jessica Corning- Mason

  Cade Fierce and Alex Marshall - Cade

  Ella Fierce and Travis McKinley- Ella

  Fierce Family

  Sam Fierce and Dani Rhodes- Sam

  Love Collection

  Vin Steele and Piper Fielding – Secret Love

  Jared Hawk and Shelby McDonald – True Love

  Erik McMann and Sheldon Case – Finding Love

  Connor Landers and Melissa Mahoney- Beach Love

  Ian Price and Cam Mason- Intense Love

  Liam Sullivan and Ali Rogers - Autumn Love

  Owen Taylor and Jill Duncan - Holiday Love

  Chase Martin and Noelle Bennett - Christmas Love

  Zeke Collins and Kendall Hendricks - Winter Love

  Troy Walker and Meena Dawson – Chasing Love

  Jace Stratton and Lauren Towne - First Love

  Gabe Richards and Leah Morrison – Forever Love

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  Dr. Sam Fierce is intelligent, sexy, and charming with a personality and carefree nature that has women flocking to him left and right. He’s still single though and has no plans on changing that any time soon. He’s seen things in his line of work that have scarred him emotionally, but he’d never let anyone know that. So for now, he’s happy with his life...sort of.

  Dani Rhodes spent her teenage years trying to find a place in the ground next to her younger sister that she’d failed. She blamed herself and couldn’t understand why no one else did. With her parents standing by her, she pulled her life together and made something of herself. But a decade later she is still single because her rotten taste in men just can’t seem to escape her. After all, in her mind she doesn’t deserve anything better.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Joy to Be Around

  Supported Her

  In His Face

  Look of Sympathy

  One for the Team

  Blamed Herself

  Played Nice in the Sandbox

  Yummy Thoughts

  Only Having Fun

  Ebbs and Flows

  Down and Dirty

  Excitement and Anticipation

  Talk About Tempting

  Working with My Hands

  Listen to Our Mothers

  Remembered Those Days

  Push the Issue

  A Reflection

  Keeping It Detached

  With the Times

  Elephant in the Room

  All the Attention

  Our First Time

  A Bigger Deal

  Dodging Bullets

  Memories Keep Us Going

  Has to Be Serious

  Too Much Too Soon

  Still Had It

  Normal Settled Down Life

  A Gesture

  Stress and Concern

  Confide in Me

  Just Floating Along

  Back the Hell Up

  What She Needed

  A Great Deal

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “All right, Fierce, get over here. You want to see what it’s all about, it’s time to watch the master.”

  Sam Fierce’s heart was racing faster than a woodpecker on crack. He was scrubbed and ready to go. He knew he wouldn’t be assisting in this surgery, just observing, but he had to start somewhere. All residents did at different points.

  He’d assisted on plenty of surgeries in the ER, but now he was ready to focus more on a specialty field. Surgical oncology. Removing masses from organs, more specifically. Tricky, tough, and not for the faint of heart.

  He didn’t want to go into general surgery. Not orthopedics either. He wanted something more detailed. Something not everyone could or wanted to do.

  He wanted to be different. He wanted to thrive. In a family as big as his—being the oldest of all his siblings and cousins—he wanted to stand out. That’s what he was going to do. He was going to make a name for himself among all the Fierces.

  The fact that he was in the OR with Dr. Salamone was enough to make him feel like he was rushing down the stairs on Christmas morning hoping Santa left him everything on his list. But this was his first scrub in and it was just an honor to be in the room.

  They were removing a small mass attached to the kidney from a thirty-two-year-old male. It should be cut and dry. Pretty simple, if having a mass removed from an organ was simple. The biopsy had already confirmed cancer two weeks ago, but if it was localized like everyone was hoping, the patient might be good to go with just removal. Lucky dude that could go live the rest of his life with his young wife in the waiting room.

  The anesthesiologist was monitoring vitals, the nurses were setting everything up and Sam was standing to the side while Dr. Salamone did what he did best. “Want to make the first incision?” he asked Sam, who stood there wide-eyed. Thankfully the mask was on his face covering the fact his jaw had just dropped. Holy shit, yeah. “It’s all marked and ready to go. Come make the first cut, then step back to give me room. This is a teaching opportunity for you. I’ve heard nothing but good things, and I want to see how steady you are when you’re put on the spot.”

  All his nerves were pushed to the side and his confidence was ready to make sure his ego put his money where his mouth was. “Oh, I’m steady, no worries there.”

  Sam stepped up, took the blade and made the cut exactly where it was marked, then stepped back and handed it off.

  “Nice and straight. Ask any questions that come to yo
ur mind.”

  “Will do,” Sam said, but so far he knew what was going on. And he still was quiet as could be, observing everything, until forty minutes later the machines started going nuts. The patient’s heart rate was dropping fast.

  Sam stepped further back to give everyone room before he was asked. He was smart enough to know when to help and when to move aside.

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Salamone asked. “There’s no excessive bleeding here.”

  The anesthesiologist answered, “His oxygen levels are dropping too.”

  Sam watched as everyone was calm and doing what they needed to. But twenty minutes later that calm had evaporated in the room like a sun shower in Hawaii. Come and gone just as fast. The patient now lay on the table with Dr. Salamone calling the time of death.

  It seemed as if it was nothing Dr. Salamone had done, but rather a reaction to the anesthesia. At least that was the best guess at the moment, but it reminded Sam that anything could happen even if it wasn’t in his hands.

  “Come on, Sam, time to tell the wife.”

  “Am I doing it?” he asked. This would be the first time he’d have to do this, and though he knew it was part of the job, he wasn’t sure he was quite ready just yet. Mentally he was trying to prepare himself and think of what the hell he was going to say.

  “No. I’ll do it. You’re still observing.”

  Sam nodded his head and pulled his gloves and mask off and tossed them away in the labeled red box while the nurses picked up the OR for the maintenance team to come in and clean it before the next patient. There would be no cleaning these memories from his mind for a long time though.

  Once they were out in the hall, Dr. Salamone turned to him and said, “Sorry you’re having to do this on your first time with me, but like I said, you have to be prepared for everything.”

  Sam couldn’t believe how calm Dr. Salamone was. He was the best Duke Cancer Center had when it came to surgical oncology. Hell, he was the best in North Carolina in Sam’s eyes. In his late forties and still improving every day. All this had been said about Dr. Salamone time and again. He hoped one day those words would be attached to his name.

  “I see that,” Sam said back, not sure what else he was supposed to say, just glad he wasn’t the one breaking the news to the family.

  They made their way to the waiting room where the patient’s wife was sitting. She looked up from where she’d been staring at the TV on the wall. When she saw them, she stood up. “How’s Paul? How did he do?”

  “Come into another room with me,” Dr. Salamone said without any emotion in his voice. It wasn’t cold, it wasn’t sympathetic, it was just...stale. Businesslike. Controlled.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, the tears already forming in her eyes, Sam could see.

  “Let’s go where it’s more private,” Dr. Salamone said.

  The three of them found a smaller room and Dr. Salamone said, “Cindy, I’m afraid that Paul didn’t make it. It appears he had a reaction to the anesthesia administered and he stopped breathing shortly after the procedure started. We did everything we could.”

  “You’re joking, right? This can’t be happening.”

  Sam looked at Cindy. She was young, probably younger than her husband, maybe closer to his age of mid to late twenties. It just made him feel as if a blade was cutting through his own chest right now with nothing to numb the pain.

  “I’m afraid not. An autopsy will be conducted, with your approval of course, for the exact cause. There is always a small percentage of patients this happens to and since he’d never been under before, we just didn’t know how he would have reacted.” Dr. Salamone reached his hand out to steady Cindy and helped her to a chair. “I’m deeply sorry. Is there someone we can call for you?”

  This was the first time Sam had seen Dr. Salamone show any emotion. It wasn’t pretend; he was truly empathetic to the situation. It was almost as if he had to get the words out first and make sure they were nice and clear and understood. Now he was the person that Sam could look up to even more.

  “My mother. Paul’s parents. I don’t know what to say to them,” Cindy said, crying now.

  “We can take care of getting someone here for you if you give us the numbers,” Dr. Salamone said softly.

  Cindy pulled out her phone and Dr. Salamone handed it to Sam. “Can you make the calls please?” he asked, nodding his head to leave the room to do it.

  “Don’t tell them Paul died over the phone,” Cindy said. The tears were running down her face. She was staring at him, desperation mixed in with grief. “I don’t want them driving here knowing that. Try not to make it sound horrible for them.”

  “Not a problem,” Sam said, walking into the hall to call the names she’d pointed to on her phone. He heard her sobbing uncontrollably on Dr. Salamone’s shoulder asking how she was going to go on without her husband. She’d never been alone. They’d just bought a house. How could she do it on her own? So many things he’d never thought of when he was dealing with the patients and not their actual lives outside of the hospital.

  He learned something today, something that modern medicine could never teach him.

  He learned that he’d never be able to put a wife through that. He was a Fierce and Fierce men took care of their significant others. If he didn’t have one, he wouldn’t have that added stress in his life. That added pressure that he wasn’t sure he could deal with when he was trying so hard to do everything right.

  The perfect son.

  The perfect surgeon.

  The perfect husband was never going to happen.

  Joy to Be Around

  “Are you ready for this, Scott?” Sam asked when he walked into the patient’s room in preop to mark him up for his surgery.

  “As ready as I’m going to be.”

  “Okay, then stand up. I’ve got my trusty sharpie here to mark where we are cutting. Don’t want to remove the wrong part of your body,” Sam said. “State your name, date of birth, and what I’m doing today so we are all on the same page.”

  “Scott Tress, March tenth, nineteen eighty-six. You’re removing a lumpy piece of fat from my liver that doesn’t belong there.”

  “You’ve said this a few times already, I’m guessing,” Sam said, his eyes squinting at the humorous tone Scott had just supplied. Some of his patients were just a joy to be around, even in the worst of situations.

  “It’s a rehearsed speech at this point.”

  Sam used the purple sharpie to circle where he was cutting and then initialed it. “Like I said, we don’t want any errors.”

  “I’d like to have kids someday,” Linda, Scott’s wife, said. “So please, only remove that ball of lump and not another...ball.”

  Sam burst out laughing. These two were a riot. Scott was lucky. His tumor wasn’t cancerous. It was just a lipoma, but it still needed to come out since it showed no signs of the growth diminishing.

  His wife and he were taking it all in stride and living life to the fullest. That’s the way they should. The way he was living his life.

  Nothing holding him back. Nothing tying him down.

  Fun with no strings, no commitments, and no stress.

  His job was stressful enough, thank you very much.

  When the curtain opened, Sam turned to see his cousin Wyatt standing there. “Hi, I’m Dr. Fierce and I’m going to put you to sleep today,” Wyatt said.

  “Oh man,” Linda said. “Are you guys brothers? There are two of you?”

  Wyatt looked at him and grinned. “Nope. We’re cousins though. I’m the other Dr. Fierce since Sam is the OG. He’s the oldest of the whole clan of us.”

  “Clan?” Scott asked. “How many is that?”

  “Well now,” Sam said, scratching his chin. “I’ve got two younger brothers. Wyatt has twin older brothers and a twin sister. Then we’ve got the quintuplets of the family. Four boys and another girl.”

  “Wow,” Linda said. “How many of you are single? I’ve got two sist
ers and, damn, they’d be drooling right now.”

  “Don’t do it,” Scott said earnestly. “Her sisters are psycho. Run while you can.”

  “The quints, or the Fierce Five as they’ve always been called, are all taken. The rest of us though, we’re enjoying the single life. Work calls,” Wyatt said, holding his laptop up. Sam couldn’t agree more with those thoughts.

  “Are you all doctors?” Linda asked. She was rubbing her hands together and Sam had a feeling this wasn’t going to drop anytime soon.

  “No. Just Wyatt and I. He puts them to sleep, and I do all the magic.”

  Wyatt snorted. “Magic. He couldn’t do what he does if it wasn’t for me sending everyone into the dreamland.”

  “So what do the rest of you do?” Scott asked.

  “Let’s see. Since we’ve got time to kill,” Sam said. “In my family, there’s me, then Bryce, he’s a Chemistry professor at Duke, and the baby is Ryder who is an architect for our fathers’ firm.”

  “Father’s, as in both of your fathers?” Linda asked. Normally Sam wasn’t this talkative, but he was really taken with this couple and Wyatt was always one to sit and chat. Besides, they were still waiting on the OR to be prepped.

  “My and Wyatt’s dads are twins and engineers. It’s the family business. Though Wyatt and I didn’t go into that business.”

  “So what about your family?” Scott asked Wyatt, getting more comfortable on the bed. If that was possible. These temporary rooms did have TVs to pass the time, but the curtains didn’t provide much privacy for people lying in a bed with a gown on and nothing else.

  “My older brother, Drake, is an engineer, Noah, his twin, is a high school principal. Then there’s me, and my sister, Jade, is also an engineer.”

  “Where did the teaching positions come from?” Linda asked, scrunching her nose like she didn’t approve for some reason. That was odd.