The Army Doc's Christmas Angel
highlight_author
Annie O'Neil
highlight_reads
15,4K
highlight_chapters
15
Chapter One
“YOU PLANNING ON wearing a track into the floor?”
Finn looked across at his boss, startled to see him in the hospital given the hour, then gave a nonchalant shrug. “Maybe. What’s it to you?”
Theo barked a good-natured laugh. “I paid for that floor. I was hoping we could keep it intact for a few more years before your lunking huge feet are embedded in it.”
Finn looked down at the honey-colored floorboards then up at his boss as he scrubbed his hand through the tangles of his dark hair. About time he got a haircut. Or invested in a comb. It had only been...oh...about fourteen years since he’d given up the buzz cuts. Didn’t stop him from thinking of himself as that fit, adrenaline-charged young man who’d stepped off the plane in Afghanistan all those years ago. Once an army man...
He took a step forward. The heat from his knee seared straight up his leg to his hip. An excruciating reminder that he was most definitely not an army man. Not ever again.
He gave Theo a sidelong look. “What are you doing here, anyway? It’s late.”
“Not that late.” Theo looked at his watch as if that confirmed it was still reasonable to be treading the hospital boards after most folk were at home having their tea. “I could ask you the same question.”
It was Avoidance Technique for Beginners and both men knew it.
They stared at one another, without animosity but unwilling to be the first to break. Lone wolf to lone wolf...each laying claim to the silence as if it were an invisible shield of strength.
Heaven knew why. It was hardly a secret that Finn was treating one of the hospital’s charity patients who was winging in from Africa today. He just...he was grateful to have a bit of quiet time before the boy arrived. His leg pain was off the charts today and once Adao arrived, he’d like to be in a place where he could assure the kid that life without a limb was worth living.
“Want to talk about it?” Theo looked about as excited to sit down and have a natter about feelings as Finn did.
“Ha! Good one.” Finn flicked his thumb toward the staff kitchen tucked behind the floor’s reception area. “I’ll just run and fill up the kettle while you cast on for a new Christmas jumper, shall I?”
Theo smirked then quickly sobered. “I’m just saying, if you ever want to...” he made little talky mouths with his hands “...you know, I’m here.”
“Thanks, mate.” He hoped he sounded grateful. He was. Not that he’d ever take Theo up on the offer.
It wasn’t just trusting Theo that was the issue. It was trusting himself. And he wasn’t there yet. Not by a long shot. Days like today were reminders why he’d chosen to live a solitary existence. You got close to people. You disappointed them. And he was done disappointing people.
Christmas seemed to suck the cheer—what little he had—right out of him. All those reminders of family and friendship and “togetherness.” Whatever the hell that was.
He didn’t do any of those things. Not anymore.
All the jolly ward decorations, staffrooms already bursting with mince pies, and festive holiday lights glittering across the whole of Cambridge didn’t seem to make a jot of difference.
He scanned the view offered by the floor-to-ceiling windows and rolled his eyes.
He was living in a ruddy 3D Christmas card and wasn’t feeling the slightest tingle of hope and anticipation the holiday season seemed to infuse in everyone else.
Little wonder considering...
Considering nothing.
He had a job. He had to do it. And having his boss appear when he was trying to clear his head before Adao arrived wasn’t helping.
He’d been hoping to walk the pain off. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes, like today, it escalated the physical and, whether he cared to admit it or not, emotional reminders of the day his life had changed forever.
Should’ve gone up to the rooftop helipad instead. No one ever really went there in the winter. Although this year the bookies were tipping the scales in favor of snow. Then it really would be like living in a Christmas card.
“Why are you here? Was there some memo about an all-staff welcoming committee?” Finn knew there wasn’t. He was just giving his boss an out if he wanted it. Bloke talk came in handy for a lot of emotional bullet dodging.
Theo sighed. “Ivy.”
Finn lifted his chin in acknowledgement. Her mystery illness had been the talk of all the doctors’ lounges. “Gotta be tough, mate.”
“’Tis.” Theo flicked his eyes to the heavens, gave his stippled jaw a scrub and gave an exasperated sigh. “I hate seeing her go through this. She’s five years old. You know?”
Oh, yeah. He knew. It was why he’d retrained as a pediatric surgeon after the IED had gone off during a standard patrol. The loss of life that day had been shameful.
All of them children.
Who on this planet targeted children?
At least he’d had an enemy to rail against. Theo was shooting in the dark at a mystery illness. No wonder the guy had rings under his eyes.
“Had anything good today?” Topic-changing was his specialty.
Theo nodded. “A few interesting cases actually.” He rattled through a few of them. “Enough to keep me distracted.”
Finn huffed out an “I hear you” laugh. Work was the only way he kept his mind off the mess he’d made of his personal life.
You’re on your own now, mate. Paying your penance, day by day.
“The diagnostician. She managed to clear her schedule yet?”
Theo nodded. “Took a bit of juggling but she’s here now.”
Finn waited for some more information—something to say what Theo thought of her—but received pure silence. Any topic related to Ivy was a highly charged one so it looked like his boss was going to reserve judgment on the highly touted globetrotter until she’d had a bit more time with his daughter.
“What’s her name again?” Finn tried again when Theo obviously wasn’t going to comment further. “I heard one of the nurse’s call her Godzilla.”
Theo gave a sharp tsk.
He didn’t like gossip. Or anything that stood in the way of the staff acting as a team. “She’s a bit of a loner. Might give off a cooler edge than some of the staff are used to. Particularly around the holidays. But she’s not yet had a chance to get her feet on the ground, let alone establish a rapport with the entire staff.” He gave Finn a quick curt nod, making it very clear that he let facts stand. Not rumor. “She’s called Madison Archer. Doesn’t get much more American than that, does it?”
“Short of being scented like apple pie, I guess not.” Finn smiled at Theo, trying to add a bit of levity, but raised his hands in apology at Theo’s swiftly narrowed eyes.
More proof, as if he needed it, that Finn was no star at chitchat. He called a spade a spade, and other than that his conversational skills were operating on low to subterranean.
Theo’s expression shifted to something indecipherable. “It’s at times like this I understand how the parents feel when they walk in the doors of our hospital. Makes it that much more important we treat each other with respect. Without that, how can we respect our patients? Ourselves?” He lifted up his hands as if seeking an answer from the universe then let them fall with a slap against his long legs.
They looked at one another a moment in silence. This time with that very same respect he’d just spoken of.
Theo was a class-A physician and this hospital—the hospital he’d built—was one of the finest in the world, and still not one of them could put a finger on what was behind Ivy’s degenerating condition. Lethargy had become leg pain. Leg pain had escalated to difficulty walking. They were even considering admitting her full time, instead of dipping in and out, things were so bad.
How the hell Theo went about running the hospital day in, day out when his little girl was sick...it would’ve done his head in.
Precisely why being on his own suited Finn to a T. No one to worry about except his patients. No emotions holding him back...as long as he kept his thoughts on the future and his damn leg on the up and up.
He gave his head a sharp shake, silently willing Theo to move on. A wince of pain narrowed the furrows fanning out from his eyes as he shifted his weight fully onto his right leg.
The infinitesimal flick of Theo’s eyes down then back up to Finn’s face meant the boss man knew precisely what was going on. But he knew better than to ask. Over a decade of wearing the prosthetic leg and he still hadn’t developed a good relationship with the thing. The number of times he’d wanted to rip it from his knee and hurl the blasted contraption off the roof...
And then where would he be? In a wheelchair like Ivy?
Nah. That wasn’t for him.
Helping children just like her—and Adao, who’d learned too much about war far too soon—were precisely why he kept it on. Standing beside the operating table was his passion. And if that meant sucking up the building pressure and tolerating the sharp needles of pain on occasion? Then so be it.
“Well...” He tried to find something positive to say and came up with nothing so fell back on what he knew best. Silence.
After a few minutes of staring out into the inky darkness he asked Theo, “You heard anything about the boy’s arrival time?”
Finn was chief surgeon on the case, but Theo had a way of knowing just that little bit more than his staff. Sign of a good leader if ever there was one.
“Adao?”
Finn nodded, unsurprised that out of a hospital full of children Theo knew exactly who he was referring to. Although they didn’t have too many children flying in from Africa just a handful of weeks before Christmas.
Then again, war never took much time to consider the holidays.
“Did they get out of the local airport in Kambela all right?” Theo asked.
“Yeah.” Finn had received an email from one of the charity workers who’d stayed behind at the war-torn country’s small clinic. “Touch and go as to whether the ceasefire would hold, but they got off without a hitch. They say his condition’s been stabilized, but the risk of infection—” He stopped himself. Infection meant more of the arm would have to come off. Maybe the shoulder. Flickers of rage crackled through him like electricity.
This was a kid. A little kid. As if growing up in a country ravaged by war wasn’t bad enough.
There had been a fragile negotiated peace in the West African country for a few months now, but thousands of landmines remained. The poor kid had been caught in a blast when another little boy had stepped on one. That boy had died instantly. The second—Adao—suffice it to say his life would never be the same.
They’d been out playing. Celebrating another renewal of the ceasefire. The horror of it all didn’t bear thinking about.
Not until he saw the injuries, assessed damage limitation, talked Adao through how he would always feel that missing arm of his, but—
Don’t go there, man. You made it. The kid’ll make it.
Hopefully he wouldn’t actively push his family away the way Finn had. If he had any leanings toward giving advice, he’d put that top of the list.
Keep those you love close to you.
Pushing them away only made the aching hole of grief that much harder to fill.
He knew that now.
Theo pulled his phone out of his pocket and thumbed through the messages. “He was meant to have been choppered in from London a couple of hours ago, right? The charity texted a while back saying something about paperwork and customs, but you’d think a boy with catastrophic injuries would outweigh a bit of petty bureaucracy.”
Finn brought his fist down on a nearby table. That sort of hold-up was unacceptable. Especially with a child’s welfare at stake.
“Hey!” Theo nodded at the table, brow creased. “You’d better apologize.”
“What?” Disbelief flashed across Finn’s features then a smile. “You want me to say sorry to the table? Sorry, table. I don’t know what got into me.” He held his hands out wide. Happy now? the gesture read.
Theo closed the handful of meters between them with a few long-legged strides, crossed his arms over his chest and looked Finn square in the eyes. “Are you all right to handle this?”
His hospital. His terms.
Fair enough.
“’Course.” Finn said. “But if you think I’m not up to it? Take me off. Bear in mind you’ll have to drag me out of here and nurse the black eyes of whoever you think can operate on Adao better than me.”
No point in saying he’d have to deliver the punches from a wheelchair if his knee carried on mimicking a welding iron.
He ground his back teeth together and waited. Theo knew as well as he did that the last thing he’d do was punch someone. But it was Theo’s hospital. Theo’s call.
Theo feigned giving Finn a quick one-two set of boxing punches, making contact with his midsection as he did.
Finn didn’t budge. He had a slight edge on Theo in height, weight and age. The Grand Poo-bah of Limb Specialists, they’d once joked.
“Look at that.” Finn’s tone was as dry as the Sahara. “I’m turning the other cheek.”
Theo widened the space between them and whistled. “Have you been working out again?”
Finn smiled. Always had. Always would.
Pushing himself to the physical limit was one of the things that kept the demons at bay.
Theo gave Finn’s shoulder a solid clap. “You’re the one I want on this. The only one.” He didn’t need to spell out to Finn how his time in the military had prepared him more than most for the injuries Adao had sustained. “Just want to make sure you’re on top form when the little guy arrives.”
“What? Nah.” Finn waved away his concerns, gritting his teeth against the grinding of his knee against his prosthesis. “I just save this curmudgeon act for you. Someone’s gotta be the grumpy old man around here.”
“I thought that was Dr. Riley.”
They both laughed. Dr. Riley had yet to be seen without an ear-to-ear grin on his face. The man had sunbeams and rainbows shooting out of his ears. The children adored him. Most people called him Dr Smiley.
Finn nodded toward the Christmas tree twinkling away in the dimly lit reception area where they stood. “A bit early, isn’t it?”
“Not if you’re Evie.”
Finn grunted. Evie was the resident Mrs. Claus around Hope Children’s Hospital. Especially now she was all loved up. Just being around her and Ryan made him...well...suffice it to say it brought up one too many memories he’d rather not confront. Love. Marriage. They’d never got as far as the baby carriage, he and Caroline. Now he supposed he never would.
Guess that made him the resident Scrooge. Not that he had anything against Christmas in particular, it was just...seeing these poor kids in hospital over the holidays always bugged him. He may not want to hang out with his own family, but he was damn sure these kids wanted nothing more than their mums and dads at the end of their beds on Christmas morning.
“Anyone else about for Adao’s arrival?”
Finn shook his head. “Not that I know about. I’ve got the usual suspects lined up for tomorrow so we can give him a proper assessment.” He listed a few names. “Right.” He clapped his hands together. “I’m going to get on up to the roof, if you don’t mind. Clear the cobwebs before Adao arrives.” He stood his ground. Theo was smart enough to take the absence of movement as his cue to leave and turned toward the bank of elevators.
“Hey,” Theo called over his shoulder as he was entering the elevator. “You know we have a team of experts who look after that sort of thing.”
Theo didn’t have to look at Finn’s knee for Finn to know what he was talking about. He knew the offer was there. He just didn’t want to take it. Pain equaled penance. And he had a helluva lot of making up to do. Parents. Brother. Ex-wife. Friends. And the list went on.
“Good to know.” He waited until the elevator doors closed before he moved.
A string of silent expletives crossed his lips as he hobbled over to a sofa, pulled up his trouser leg and undid the straps to ease the ache in his knee, not even caring when the whole contraption clattered to the floor.
One breath in...one breath out...and a silent prayer of thanks that he had this moment alone. He didn’t do weak.
Not in public anyway.
The handful of moments he’d let himself slide into self-pity over the years...those would remain buried in his chest as bitter reminders of the paths he shouldn’t have taken. The lessons he should’ve learned.
He gave his prosthesis a bit of a kick.
“It’s just you and me, mate. Guess we’d better start finding a way to make nice.”
