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  Stay Lucky

  by

  HALSEY HARLOW

  An Original Publication from Lucky Honey Books

  Written and published by Halsey Harlow Cover by Dar Albert

  Formatted by BB eBooks Copyright © 2018 by Lucky Honey Books Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. They should not be construed as real or related to any individual. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or people, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written consent from the author.

  First Digital Edition, 2018

  ISBN: 9781626227736

  A second chance to build the family of their dreams.

  Dr. Grant Anderson never expected a second chance with Leo Garner. Leo’s current significant other is a movie star, and who can compete with that? But when Leo’s health problems resurface and his relationship sours over the care of his adopted daughter, he returns home to North Carolina to start over from scratch. Does he want a do-over with Grant too?

  The heat between Leo and Grant is explosive and undeniable, and their affection reignites as well. Can their fresh start survive Leo’s health scares, his daughter’s anxieties, a return of the jerk ex, and both their insecurities? And can they make a new family for themselves?

  This book is over 40,000 words of sweet, sexy romance with a happy ending you’ll love!

  For Luck

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About the Author

  Warning: if you’re employed in the medical field, some suspension of disbelief may be required.

  Prologue

  The cicadas rattled endlessly in the trees, filling the humid summer evening with sound. The chill of the soda bottle in his palm was the only relief from the sticky balm of the overheated summer as Grant relaxed back into the wooden lawn chair. He watched the blur of little Lucky’s pale legs darting beneath her pale yellow dress. Her brown hair trailed out behind her, as she skirted the edge of the glassy pond.

  Holding one fist aloft, Lucky called out, “I have vanquished the foul Medusa! I, Perseus, shall save you now, oh, my darling Andromeda!”

  “Are you certain the birth certificate wasn’t forged?” Grant asked, sipping his beer, and wiping the sweat from his upper lip. He ran a hand through his sweaty dark hair, and then over his equally dark chest hair, proudly shirtless and baking in the sun. His khaki shorts clung to his legs in the evening heat.

  “Yes, I’m sure, jerk,” Leo answered, twirling a piece of mint in his hand, and sniffing it occasionally. He wore a white t-shirt and cut-off jean shorts. His wheat-colored hair swooped back from his forehead in a loose fall.

  “She doesn’t look or act like she’s five, and this thing for Greek Myths is—”

  “Precocious, I know.” Gray eyes sparkling, Leo grinned at him.

  Grant wrinkled his nose. “Ehhh, yeah, no, I was gonna go with weird.”

  “Her life’s pretty out of control right now,” Leo said. “The myths are messy, too, but they have their own kind of justice. Medusa’s head turns the sea-monster to stone, Andromeda and Perseus are happy together.”

  “Zeus can’t keep his pants on.”

  Leo laughed. “True. But I think she needs the myths right now.”

  “She needs Sesame Street.”

  Leo rolled his eyes adorably. “Come on, you love it.”

  Grant shrugged. He did. He loved taking Lucky around to the nurses’ stations and watching all their faces go from delighted to confused in ten seconds flat. He loved the feel of her little hand in his, and the way she smiled whenever she saw him. And he loved the most the way her father looked just a little healthier when Lucky was around.

  It’d been ten months since he’d seen Leo for the second first time, and six months since he’d been able to do this like it was a regular thing, like it was part of his life that wasn’t going to disappear. Six whole months of Lucky doing dot-to-dots at the table, calling out biology questions as they struck her, while Grant and Leo chopped up salad in the kitchen. Six whole months of the best days of his life.

  “What’s a brain eat, Dr. Grant?” Lucky had asked the prior Friday.

  “Not junk food,” Leo had said. “I can tell you that much.”

  Grant explained about glucose and Lucky had nodded along, saying, finally, “So, it does eat sugar. Jello has sugar.”

  “It’s different,” Leo hastened to clarify. “Tell her Grant.”

  Grant sighed. “My brain, which we all know is the greatest brain in the state, much less the room—”

  “Why not say the whole country?” Leo smirked.

  “I was attempting that modesty thing you’re always telling me about.”

  “And failing.”

  “Because it’s a lie! This proves my point! Modesty is just a lie designed to make others feel better about being losers.”

  Leo laughed and shook his head at Grant.

  Clearing his throat, Grant had gone on, “So, Lucky, as I was saying, the greatest brain in the whole country loves to eat the sugar from Jello.”

  “Oh, Grant,” Leo chided.

  “Red Jello, especially. Either flavor, strawberry, cherry, I don’t care, so long as it has those extra mind and mood altering substances in the dye. You know the dye made from smashed poisonous bugs? Yep, that’s what my brain likes.”

  Leo had punched his arm, and it still made Grant happy to think of the smile that Leo had tried to hide under his mock anger.

  That was three days ago, and now Lucky splashed in the edge of the water alongside the pond, slashing at the air, killing invisible monsters. Leo was probably right that it made her feel better to destroy something in her imagination when she couldn’t kill the thing that terrified her the most in her actual life.

  “What are you thinking about?” Leo said, tossing the mint at him. “You look unhappy.”

  “Tomorrow,” Grant said. “Jameson is an arrogant idiot who barely scraped by with an A minus in his high school chemistry class, so why they let him anywhere near people’s bodies with a scalpel, I don’t know, and why you’re going to let him touch you with it—”

  “You looked up his high school records? Is that legal? How did you even manage that?”

  “Your police chief Memaw shared my concerns,” Grant said.

  “Is it a good idea to undermine the patient’s belief in his surgeon’s competence like this?”

  Grant opened and closed his mouth a few times before saying, “It’s not too late to fly in someone better.”

  “Jameson’s plenty good at this, Grant. He’s done dozens of kidney transplants.” Leo leaned over and rested his head on Grant’s shoulder. “If we’re going to worry about anything, we should worry about whether my sister is going to bail again. Mom says she’s committed this tim
e, but I don’t know. It’s a big thing, giving away a kidney. I’m sure she’s scared.”

  “Oh, please. Last time I checked you’re raising her—” Grant barely stopped himself from saying bastard, just in case Lucky could hear him. “You’re raising Lucky, and so I’d say she owes you. If her little feelings are in an uproar about having her side cut into and a pretty little scar left behind—”

  “She’s still my kid sister.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s not a kid.” Grant pointed at Lucky who was throwing sticks into the water. “That? That’s a kid. And she needs you because her bratty mother hasn’t done the right thing with her life even once since she was seventeen years old, so spare me your consideration for Jennifer’s feelings.”

  “Why, Dr. Anderson, who knew you were so opinionated?”

  Grant said, “Everybody.”

  “I probably should be offended.”

  “Why?”

  Leo rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I can’t be bothered to explain it to you tonight. I’d rather think about other things. Like how nice it will be to feel better. I’ve been meaning to show you a thing or two,” Leo said, wagging his brows suggestively.

  “Yeah, right,” Grant said. “Try the other way around.”

  “Like I said, it’ll be nice.”

  “I don’t always play nice.”

  “No joke,” Leo laughed. “You’re worse than a five year old when it comes to sharing, eating well, sleeping, and generally maintaining social decorum.”

  “I have to beat the competition,” Grant said nodding Lucky’s way. “I can’t let her win, can I? What kind of example would that set?”

  “Somehow, I think you’ve got this all backward.” Leo laughed. He rested his head back against his chair, and scooted down. “As much as I want to stay out here forever, watching Lucky, and making the day last, I’m getting tired.”

  Grant said nothing, the sweat on his body feeling suddenly cold. Tomorrow morning Dr. Ken Jameson would be cutting into Leo, taking the kidney they would harvest from Jennifer in the adjoining operating room and putting it directly into Leo’s right side, just above his non-functioning right kidney. Then they’d sew him up, leaving a fresh new scar on Leo’s right side to match the one on his chest.

  “I’m scared,” Leo said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Grant said.

  “If something happens to me, I want you to know that Curtis is still legally her other parent. He’s promised, though, to give up his rights and to allow my mother to adopt Lucky.”

  “Leo,” Grant said, putting up a hand because he couldn’t hear this. He couldn’t think about this.

  “Just listen, okay? And I’ve told my mom that I want you in her life. Okay? Promise me, if something happens to me, you’ll be there for Lucky. No matter what.”

  Grant stared at Leo, and he felt like he could see Leo’s brain, see the twisted, riveting gray matter that housed the person that Grant loved. “I give you my word.”

  Leo relaxed back into his seat again. “Thank you.”

  Grant stared at the side of Leo’s face, the way his neck met with his jaw line, and the length of his lashes blinking slowly.

  Lucky ran up to them, then, her hands covered in mud, and she held them out dramatically, saying, “Out damn spot! Out I say!”

  Grant looked pointedly at Leo, who smiled and said, “Okay, so maybe weird.”

  Chapter One

  Ten Months Earlier

  Grant was having a terrible day. It’d started with a patient dying on the table, unexpected damage that blocked the way to the tumor, resulting in one defining moment where Grant cut and a surprise bleeder spurted across the room.

  It’d gone downhill from there, and the DNR made it final, even when Grant wasn’t convinced it needed to be.

  Then, inexplicably, his lunch had been stolen out of the freezer by some jackass. He wasn’t even sure why, given that it was just a disgusting microwavable thing. Then, when he’d gone down to endure the hospital’s cafeteria, he realized that despite all evidence to the contrary, the devil did exist, and he was out to get him. Because the cafeteria was closed for some kind of routine cleaning or maintenance, Grant didn’t know, and Grant didn’t care.

  He was hungry and angry as he stomped across the third floor’s main lobby. And that’s when he saw Leo Garner, the Leo Garner who’d dumped Grant in favor of his aspiring actor ex six years ago. He stood talking to a nurse smiling, laughing, and gesticulating with his hands in a way that’d always made Grant take notice.

  What was Leo doing there, existing in Grant Anderson’s hospital, when he was supposed to be across the country with his now super-famous and super-hot boyfriend, Curtis Banks? What the hell? It wasn’t even Christmas!

  Without thinking twice, Grant turned on his heels and left. He didn’t care that patients were waiting, that he had paperwork up to his ears, or that nurses would be left making frantic phone calls in confusion because for the first time in as many years as he’d been there, Dr. Grant Anderson had simply walked out with no indication of when he’d be back. If he didn’t get away from the hellhole known as Appalachian Medical, he was going to injure someone.

  Possibly himself.

  Back in his apartment, Grant popped open a beer and stared at the blank television screen. The kind of day he was having, it hadn’t come as any surprise that there was nothing to watch. Even the cable company had decided to pile on, presenting him with Pollyanna Lifetime Television bullshit or screaming politicians as his options, and the one soap opera he’d considered sinking into mind-numbing hell with currently featured a storyline with an idiot soap-opera-gay who couldn’t choose between two equally ugly losers.

  Grant threw the remote across the room. “What the hell? It’s not like he’ll get to sleep with either of them anyway. The American Family Association would burn the studio down.”

  He rubbed at his eyes and shook his head, trying to get a grip on the low, thrumming rage that was coursing through him.

  The phone rang. God, could this day get any worse? Grant glanced at the caller id and cursed himself for asking.

  “Anderson,” he said, holding the phone to his ear.

  “Hey, partner,” Dennis McGraw, his chief of staff, husband of his best friend, and his arch-nemesis extraordinaire, said cheerily. “Taking a mental health day?”

  “My disappearance made the hospital message board so soon?” Grant asked, shaking his head in annoyance.

  “Yep. Word is Dr. Anderson cracked up today. Finally. Money is exchanging hands all over the place. Apparently, there was a pool about whether or not you were even human,” Dennis said.

  Grant rolled his eyes. “If you cut me, do I not bleed?”

  “We weren’t sure. Not that I condone that kind of thing. Hold on a second.” Muffled, as though talking to someone beside him, he went on, “No, give me two twenties and two fives, and I’ll give you three ones, and we’re good. Huh? Sure. Okay, I’m back.”

  “Not that you condone that kind of thing,” Grant repeated.

  “So, you lost a patient today. Take a break. Work it out. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Grant hung up on Dennis before anything else could be said.

  It wasn’t about the patient. Well, it was, but it was the cafeteria that had really been too much for him. It certainly wasn’t seeing Leo that’d driven him out of the place. Sure, it was obnoxious running into him, but he’d endured the last four Christmas encounters just fine. It wasn’t as though he’d been in love with the guy. So far his heart was pure in that regard; there’d never been any disturbing taint of unregulated affection. But, if he was honest with himself, which he was admittedly reluctant to be, with Leo it had been a very close thing.

  If things had gone differently after Curtis Banks had come back to Blountville, North Carolina to beg Leo to return to Los Angeles with him, playing on their history as high school sweethearts, and promising him a bright future as the boyfriend of a brand-new tv star, well, God,
he could have fallen down that terrifying rabbit hole known as love.

  He shuddered.

  Thankfully that hadn’t happened. Truth be told, Grant didn’t want to even think about where he could have ended up. He’d never been a fan of heartbreak. He didn’t find it romantic, or charming, or sexy. He preferred clean relationships of casual friendship and good sex, uncomplicated by that painful affection he’d nearly had a taste of, and then luckily been denied.

  So, no, Leo was not the reason he’d left the hospital. It was a cumulative effect of unwelcome things. Grant turned the television back on and clicked through the channels again. Once again, there was nothing good on. So he paused on the soap opera and rolled his eyes, groaning when the soap-opera-gay kissed one of the guys pining after him, while the other watched from around the corner with a broken-hearted face.

  “Loser,” Grant muttered, putting the empty beer bottle on the coffee table, and leaned back in hopes of falling asleep. The melodramatic swells of the music following him into his dreams.

  Chapter Two

  A couple of days later, Grant’s life had slowed down from the jam-packed insanity of making up for all of the things he’d walked out on after he’d found the cafeteria closed. Dennis McGraw, in all his blue-eyed, blond handsomeness, cornered Grant in the hallway, though, and congratulated him on taking time for himself after his loss on Monday.

  “It’s always hard when we lose a patient, and I’m glad you did the right thing by giving yourself a break.”

  Grant stared at him. “Thanks for your permission. Friend.”

  Dennis narrowed his eyes, sensing the challenge. “Alec sends his love.” It was his way of reminding Grant of one important reason why they shouldn’t fight.

  “Great. Thanks.”

  Dennis sighed. “Do you have to be this way? I know you think I’m not good enough for him, but Alec is happy.”

  “There’s happy and then there’s happy.”