Twisted Hate: An Enemies with Benefits Romance

You’ve gotta be shitting me.
It had to be another Jules Ambrose. The universe wouldn’t have that
fucked up of a sense of humor.
But when I pushed open the door to room four with a shaking hand, there
she was, looking like she’d stepped right out of my most beautiful nightmare.
She stared back at me, her eyes wide with shock. A nasty cut slashed
across the corner of her forehead and hit me like a punch in the gut.
Jules. Hurt.
Time slowed into one endless, painful beat. It was so quiet I could count
each individual thud of my pulse. 
One. Two. Three.
You’d think a week would be long enough to blunt the serrated edges of
my pain, but you’d be wrong. They raked against my insides, making me
bleed all over again, but they were nothing compared to the worry raging in
my gut.
How the hell did Jules get that cut? What if it was infected? What if she
—
Jules shifted, and the soft squeak of leather finally dragged me out of my

---

trance.
In this room, we weren’t exes. 
She was a patient; I was her doctor. This wasn’t the time to wallow in our
personal history or freak out over one small cut…no matter how much the
sight of her blood made my heart twist.
“I’m Dr. Chen.” I spoke in a clipped, professional tone, thankful none of
my inner turmoil bled through.
I would treat Jules like I would any other patient—one I didn’t know. 
The more distance I placed between us, the better.
“Hi, Dr. Chen. I’m Jules.” The tiniest of tentative smiles played on her
mouth and stole the breath right out of my fucking lungs.
Focus.
Thank God my attending physician wasn’t here. As a third-year resident,
I usually started the patient encounter before telling my attending, who’ll see
the patient on his own after I gave him the pertinent information.
If my attending were here, he would not have approved of how distracted
I was. He could always tell when my head wasn’t in the game.
Clara had already checked Jules’s ABC’s—airway, breathing, and
circulation—so I jumped straight into the questions, hoping they’d ground
me.
“What happened?” I stared at my clipboard like it was the most
fascinating thing I’d ever seen. The less I looked at her, the less likely I was
to cave like a cheap umbrella during a thunderstorm. I was still pissed at her.
One injury didn’t change that.
She’s fine. It’s just a cut.
“I fell down the stairs,” she said quietly.
My hand stilled for a fraction of a second before I continued my notes.
My heart thumped so loud it almost drowned out my next words. “How many
stairs were there?”
“Maybe a dozen? I’m not sure.”
Fuck. Sweat coated my skin at the mental image of Jules crumpled at the
bottom of a flight of stairs. I almost reached for her the way I would’ve had
we still been dating, but I forced my personal feelings aside and examined
her extremities for injuries.
I couldn’t find any physical wounds except for the cut on her forehead
and a couple of bruises, but that didn’t mean she was in the clear. 
The sweat intensified as the worst-case scenarios for all possible internal

---

injuries flashed through my mind.
Stop. She’s your patient. That’s it. 
“Did you hit your head?” It was an obvious question, given the cut, but I
had to ask.
Jules nodded.
“Did you pass out?” 
“Yes.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and ran through the rest of my
questions. 
Are you taking any blood thinners? No.
Is there any chance you’re pregnant? No.
“Are you hurting anywhere in particular right now?” 
My question hung between us, thick with unspoken meaning.
Despite everything that happened between us, the thought of Jules hurt
made it so fucking hard to breathe.
“My head, shoulder, and lower back.”
“What about your neck?” I felt along her C-spine and breathed a silent
sigh of relief when she didn’t flinch. “Does it hurt?”
Jules shook her head. “No. It’s just the places I mentioned. Physically,
anyway,” she added softly.
The air thinned while the ache in my chest intensified.
She was so close I could hear her breathing. 
I’d forgotten how much I loved that sound—the sound of her just
existing, reminding me that no matter how fucked up the world got, there was
at least one good thing in it. 
At least, there used to be.
I set my jaw and finished the physical examination as quickly as possible.
“Right. I’ll order a CT scan, just in case.” My crisp words bounced through
the fluorescent-lit room, erasing any hint of softness. “How did you fall down
the stairs?”
A long silence passed before she answered. “Someone pushed me.”
I stared at her, sure I’d heard wrong. “Someone pushed you.” 
Jules nodded, her lips tight. “I was walking down the stairs after my bar
exam. I was distracted, so I wasn’t paying much attention to my
surroundings. The person…surprised me, and they pushed me when I tried to
get away. I hit my head and passed out. When I woke up, I was in the back of
a taxi with a woman, someone I recognized from the testing site. She said

---

she’d just entered the stairwell when she heard me fall, but she didn’t see
anyone else. She dropped me off at the hospital and, well, here I am.”
She relayed what happened in a matter-of-fact manner, but the slight
shake in her voice told me the incident freaked her out more than she let on.
Slow, poisonous rage oozed into my bloodstream. 
I wasn’t a stranger to anger, but I’d never felt like this before.
Like I wanted to hunt down the person responsible and rip them apart
with my bare fucking hands. 
“Who?” My calm voice belied the violence brewing in my stomach.
“Who did this to you?”
She said the person surprised her. Judging from her tone, it was someone
she knew.
I guessed the answer before she told me.
“Max.” Apprehension crept into Jules’s eyes, like she was afraid of how
I’d react to the name, and for good fucking reason.
Max. The guy who had a sex tape of her. Who blackmailed her into
stealing from me. Who put his fucking hands on her and destroyed the only
beautiful thing in my life…us. 
My rage deepened, tinting my world a bloody crimson. 
“I see.” I betrayed none of the emotion roaring through my chest. “I’m
going to make some arrangements for your CT scan. I’ll be right back.”
I left the room and pulled out my phone. It took me less than two seconds
to shoot Alex a text.