Surgeon's Brooding Brazilian Rival
Author
Luana DaRosa
Reads
17.8K
Chapters
12
It's heating up in Argentina! Join two trauma surgeons as their work rivalry quickly transforms into a fiery fling in this second installment of the Buenos Aires Docs quartet. FRICTION TO RED-HOT FLIRTATION… Everything else took a back seat as Sofia fought to become a trauma surgeon. She's never met anyone who's as dedicated and meticulous as her. Until world-renowned Dr. Carlos Cabrera arrives. But while her rival's arrogance is exasperating, he makes her pulse race exponentially… The single thing Sofia and brooding Carlos agree on? The passion that sparked in the operating room can only end in the Brazilian's bedroom!
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOUND OF water pouring out of the tap and skin rubbing against skin filled the scrub room. Carlos looked up from the sink, his eyes scanning the operating room through the window. The members of staff stood by their assigned places, waiting for their patient to be brought in. A patient that should have already been here five minutes ago when the ER had paged him to let him know an emergency surgery was coming up.
His eyes narrowed on the clock on the other side of the OR, and his lips pressed into a thin line as he watched the seconds tick by. He released the foot pedal, and the flow of water stopped. When he turned around, the OR nurse was already waiting with a towel for him to dry his arms before helping him into the gown and gloves.
‘Where is our patient?’ Carlos asked as he stepped through the doors.
‘I’ll call them to find out,’ one nurse said, and Carlos nodded as she approached the phone hanging on the wall next to the monitoring equipment. As he waited, he let his eyes wander around the room, giving each staff member a once-over. The surgeon assisting him was missing, too. They were most likely with the patient transport after having done the initial consult.
He’d arrived at Hospital General de Buenos Aires almost a week ago. This was the first time the staff hadn’t impressed him with the level of service and dedication they put forward. Sebastián Lopez, the joint head of emergency medicine at the hospital with his wife, Isabella, had approached him at a conference where Carlos had been one of the keynote speakers.
Though they had mainly spoken about Carlos’s specific method of triaging during a multidiscipline surgery, he’d got the feeling from the other man that there had been more to the conversation. That ‘more’ turned out to be a job offer to come to Buenos Aires and teach the trauma surgeons there how to run a service the way Carlos Cabrera would.
This was definitely not how Carlos Cabrera ran his trauma surgery. In his world, early was on time, and on time was already being late. Which made this patient transport very late. In his discipline of medicine, every second counted, and he’d witnessed enough cases where those few extra seconds had decided between life and death.
For a member of his team to be late in delivering a patient was unacceptable. The ER was right underneath the trauma surgery ORs. He knew exactly how long it took for a patient to be transported upstairs because on his first day he’d timed it himself, so he knew what to expect from the people on the team.
Carlos rolled his jaw, forcing the tight muscles to relax when the doors finally opened and the gurney with the patient rolled into the OR.
‘Get into gear, everyone. Time’s wasting,’ Carlos said, turning towards the anaesthetist with an impatient nod.
‘There was a—’ a female voice said behind him, but he cut her off without turning around.
‘I’m not interested in excuses, only that we start this surgery with no further delay. Are you my missing surgeon?’ He watched the anaesthetist remove the IV drip from the patient’s arm and insert the cannula to push the anaesthetic through.
‘I’m a trauma surgeon at this hospital, but I’m certainly not your surgeon.’ Carlos furrowed his brow and looked over his shoulder as the woman spoke in clipped words. What was that supposed to mean? But all he caught was a wisp of brown hair that vanished behind the door to the scrub room.
His eyes shot to the window where the woman appeared a heartbeat later, her lips moving in a silent litany as she stuck her hands under the tap. Their gazes collided when she looked up, and a strange sensation of familiarity washed over him as he beheld the honey-brown eyes. Sebastián had introduced Carlos to all the surgeons on staff when he had arrived earlier in the week, including her.
Her smile had been wide as she greeted him, her grip strong when she shook his hand, and the scent of apricot had lingered in his nose long after he’d turned to other staff members to greet them. It was that scent that came rushing into his conscious mind now, setting his focus off-kilter.
Carlos’s hand had lingered on hers for a fraction of a second, enough time for a spark to travel up his arm and spread an unfamiliar heat through his chest. It was the echo of that heat rising inside of him again that kept his eyes glued to her face, watching her through the glass.
‘The patient had a tracheotomy performed. I’ll connect the tube to the ventilator, and we’ll have to switch to manual aspiration once you’re ready to pull it out,’ the anaesthetist said behind him, forcing Carlos out of his head and back into the OR.
‘A tracheotomy?’ He spun around to face the patient, stepping closer and bending down to inspect the tube sticking out of his patient’s throat.
The briefing he’d received just ten minutes ago didn’t include any information about a blocked airway that required this form of intubation. A part of him wanted to turn around again and face the woman—Dr Martinez, Sebastián’s voice echoed in his head—to ask her what had happened. But the loud beeping of a monitor drew his attention back to the critical condition of his patient.
‘His blood pressure is dropping. We need to get him open now and take care of the internal bleeding.’ Pushing the swirl of thoughts away, Carlos stepped towards the patient and reached his hand out to receive the scalpel the OR nurse already held in her hand.
‘This is not good,’ Carlos mumbled to himself as he opened the patient up and beheld the extent of the injury.
Though he had worked in trauma surgery from the moment he had started his internship in Rio de Janeiro many years ago, seeing some of the devastation the human body could withstand didn’t get any less humbling—especially when he was the one knitting people back together.
‘I need an extra pair of hands,’ he said, and as he was about to look up to search for Dr Martinez, two slender gloved hands appeared in his field of vision.
‘I’m here,’ she said, not offering any other comment about her lateness. Not that it mattered. He had meant it when he said he wasn’t interested in what had taken her so long. They could have that argument later.
‘Nice of you to join us, Martinez,’ he said, unable to help himself with the jab. In all his years working at the largest emergency rooms all across South America, he hadn’t let a single co-surgeon down, and it was that kind of dedication he expected from everyone else.
Her eyes shot up at him and narrowed into slits, and for a distracting second, he wondered what her lips looked like underneath her mask. Were they drawn into a tight line, hiding their fullness from view?
‘Blood is pooling around the liver, and there’s a discolouration of his kidney. Something to look at once we get the bleeding under control.’ Carlos focused his mind on the surgery at hand, a frown tugging at the corners of his lips as he realised how easily Dr Martinez held his attention.
What was it about her that drew him in without his permission? He hadn’t even spent any time with her outside of their brief introduction.
‘Suction or sponges?’ Martinez asked, her hand already outstretched to grasp whatever he said.
‘I’ll take suction while you pack the liver and stop more blood from pooling,’ he replied, and took the aspirator from the nurse.
The sputtering of the suction drowned out the beeping of the monitor, and Carlos listened to the anaesthetist keeping him appraised of the vital signs of the patient.
‘The ER said he was in an accident on a construction site. Do you know what happened?’ He didn’t look up as he asked the question, his hand steady as he cleared the surgical field of the excess blood. ‘Hand me the stapler, please,’ he said as he handed the suction tube off.
‘You’re going to staple the laceration shut?’ That question was the first thing Dr Martinez had said since she had begun packing the liver and its surroundings with surgical sponges to soak up as much blood as possible. With her efforts on these fronts and him suctioning the rest away, he could now see where the organ had torn on impact.
‘Staples are quicker than sutures and just as effective,’ he countered, then placed the medical stapler onto the cut and set the first staple. ‘There will be some scarring, but considering the situation he’s in, it will be the least of his problems.’
Carlos didn’t wait for Dr Martinez to object any further and stapled the rest of the wound with sure, swift hands.
‘He got crushed underneath a steel beam,’ she said when he had finished closing the cut on the liver, and it took Carlos a second to remember the context. He’d asked what had happened.
‘The bruising on the kidney worries me. Not enough to put in a drain, though... He’s hanging on right now, but the thread is thin. There will be follow-up surgeries in the next few days.’ Carlos paused, assessing the patient before going over to the monitor with the vital signs on it. The patient’s blood pressure had evened out, showing Carlos they had stopped the source of the internal bleeding.
‘With an injury like this, he could suffer from crush syndrome. If he’s stable enough to be transported, we should put him on fluids and monitor his kidney function every hour,’ Dr Martinez said, to which Carlos nodded.
‘Very well, Martinez. Let’s close him up.’
The rest of the surgery went by without another hitch, and Sofia was grateful for that. Her hands were steady, but her breath quickened and came out in short, quick bursts.
I’m not interested in any excuses.
His words echoed in her head throughout the surgery, sending waves of hot and cold through her. The last time she’d received such a dressing down had been during her internship years ago from a particularly difficult senior surgeon. Carlos Cabrera was apparently trying to rival him as the most unpleasant surgeon she’d ever had the misfortune to work with.
Dr Morales had never passed up an opportunity to criticise her in front of her peers, taking any excuse to reprimand her. What exactly made her that special to the old surgeon, she never knew. But because of his scathing words, Sofia got into the habit of triple-checking every single step inside and outside of the OR. The rule book had become her best friend because her only defence had been to explain her actions in the context of medical studies and guides.
Unlike the grumpy surgeon from her internship, at least Carlos was easy on the eyes when he gave her grief. His cheekbones were set high, the gentle slope downward giving his face a regal quality that was both alluring and infuriatingly superior. Along with the perfectly groomed hair and brown eyes that seemed to note everything around them, he resembled an actor playing a surgeon. The impression had been so stark, Sofia couldn’t help but stare, inexplicably drawn to him.
Sebastián himself had told her he and the chief of surgery had worked together to bring Carlos here. They wanted the entire surgical and emergency medicine team to learn from him.
And the worst part about the surgery today was that she actually had learned something. Staples weren’t a new invention, and she had used them plenty of times when working in the emergency room to quickly patch up surface wounds. But for repairing damage she found internally, Sofia always took the time to do the sutures, sometimes even feeling hurried during high-pressure situations.
Staples were a quick and easy solution, the downside of them being excessive scarring that could lead to further complications. But in a discipline like trauma surgery, the quick fix was most often also the right fix.
The heart rate monitor beeped, drawing Sofia’s thoughts back into the OR as Alejandra, the junior surgeon next to her, shuffled her feet. Alejandra’s surgical gown rustled as she bent over the patient to look at his throat.
‘Are we leaving the tracheotomy like this?’ Alejandra asked.
‘Yes,’ Carlos replied just as Sofia had finished taking a breath to answer the question herself. ‘In the state he’s in, he’ll need to remain intubated and on ventilation. There will be a follow-up surgery tomorrow where the cardiovascular team will decide what to do.’
Alejandra nodded, and Sofia bit back a sharp retort and forced her hand to relax. As he spoke, her grip around the retractor had tightened.
Why was she so bothered by this guy? He wasn’t that special. Although she couldn’t deny the admiration she felt—much like the look she saw on Alejandra’s face. She recognised his potential to teach her much, and her skin flushed every time she looked at him, reminded of the expertise he brought to the table.
When he was working opposite her in the OR, it was far too easy to get lost in his lilting baritone voice as he narrated the surgery while her eyes tracked his every more.
Now as he patted the film dressing on the incision wound onto the patient’s skin. His fingers moved with an unexpected delicacy, contrasting with his stern demeanour. The soft touch evoked an unbidden thought in the back of her mind as Sofia wondered what his hands would feel like without the gloves. Would they feel rough as each of his calluses scraped against her skin?
‘You ready for the tape, Martinez?’ His deep voice dragged her out of the fantasy playing in her head, and Sofia repressed a shudder. Carlos touching her was not only inappropriate, it was also not how she felt about him. Wherever that thought had come from, it needed to go straight back there and never return.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, swallowing the sorry that was forming on her tongue. She might have been more apologetic to other colleagues, but if Carlos wanted to be abrasive, then he could take it as well.
Pulling the tape to the appropriate size, she held it out to Alejandra, who cut it. Then she angled the piece of tape to align with where Carlos’s hand was holding down the dressing. She placed it at the far end, patting it so it would stick, and then slowly ran her hand up the dressing, flattening the tape until her hand connected with Carlos’s, which was still holding the film in place.
The spark created by that small touch travelled down her arm in an electric wave, singeing everything in its wake. The sensation took her by surprise, her lips parting as a soft, unbidden gasp emerged.
An instant later, his eyes shot up to hers, narrowed into slits as he levelled a stare at her. Dear God, had he heard her even over the low whirring of the ventilator and the constant beeping from the vital monitors? The last thing she needed was Carlos Cabrera thinking she had a thing for him.
‘You’re assigned to my operating room for today?’ Carlos asked as he turned away to let the nurse assist him with his gown. Sofia noted the terse undertone in his voice. He had definitely caught her gasp.
‘I am. Is that going to be a problem?’ she asked curtly, even though she knew she shouldn’t, and turned as well to get help with her own surgical gown.
After the public dressing down he’d given her about being late, she didn’t care. What would have the other option been? Not performing a tracheotomy on the patient? She would have been on time, but there wouldn’t have been a need for surgery at all.
When Carlos didn’t answer, she whirled around to look at him and caught a glimpse of an amused expression before the shutters fell down, leaving her with nothing but the mask of cool professionalism she already knew he usually wore.
‘Just don’t be late again and we won’t have any problems,’ he said before turning towards the anaesthetist, trying to get his attention.
As he turned away, a sinking feeling settled in her stomach. An entire afternoon with him? She sighed, mentally bracing herself. He’d better not make any other big deals about her conduct. Sofia was not about to withhold any life-saving measures just because he liked to keep to the schedule. Surgery was unpredictable, and she’d thought a renowned surgeon like Carlos would have understood that better.