SAFE TO MOVE

The last time Dr. Leah Matsuda called a patient "safe to move," she learned what one sentence can cost.

Eight years later, she's the ICU attending the nurses at Alder Reach Medical Center call when the numbers look fine and something is still wrong. She traces every line herself. She checks unstable transfers personally, more often than anyone thinks she should. And she no longer says safe when what she means is acceptable risk.

Matias Rios is the critical-care transport nurse trusted with the region's sickest patients: ventilators, blood-pressure drips, rain-slick coastal roads, and cloud low enough to ground the helicopter. Once a patient is in his ambulance, the journey is his. Once the handoff is done, so is he.

Then a small coastal hospital calls about Mara Bell, forty-six, on a ventilator, her lungs failing faster than her local team can support. Leah wants Mara more stable before she moves. Matias says staying has become the greater danger. Only one of them gets to make the call.

Mara's long fight for every breath keeps pulling them back together: across the transfer desk, in the equipment bay, on the metal bench outside the ambulance doors. Leah starts trusting his hands with her patients. Matias starts staying after the work is finished. But a doctor who can't let go and a nurse who never stays will have to risk the one thing neither has learned to do: hand over what matters most, and stay when nobody needs you to.

Safe to Move is a slow-burn, steamy closed-door medical romance about two seasoned clinicians, set in a Pacific Northwest hospital in the dead of winter. It's Book 2 in the Alder Reach Medical Center series, reads as a standalone, and ends with a hard-won happily ever after.