Heart Surgeon's Second Chance
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Allie Kincheloe
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16.5K
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CHAPTER ONE
DREAD POOLED LOW in Rhiann’s stomach as the door to the exam room opened with a slow and ominous creak. Broad shoulders in a white coat filled the space and her eyes roamed the doctor’s familiar form, taking in the subtle changes time had wrought.
Three years ago he hadn’t had those deep lines etched into his face. His dark hair had a little more silver at the temple than she remembered, but he was as lean and handsome as ever.
Dr. Patrick Scott stepped into the room, his eyes looking down at the screen of the silver laptop in his hand. His movements carried the spicy aroma of his cologne into the small room, the pleasing notes covering the harsh antiseptic and teasing a part of her that had gone dormant since her divorce.
But on top of the overtly masculine scent he brought with him a wave of sadness that hinted at tragedy.
“Hello, Mrs.... Masters...um...”
His deep gravelly voice trailed off and his sky-blue eyes jerked up to meet hers when he recognized her name. The slight fake smile he’d had on his lips when he’d opened the door faded fast. Judging from the ice that frosted over his gaze, the animosity he held for her hadn’t eased since she’d last seen him.
The exam room door shut behind him with an audible click and the laptop clattered slightly as he set it roughly on the counter.
“What are you doing here?”
The uncharacteristic coldness in his tone sent a shiver coursing down her spine. Patrick’s voice had always held such emotion, its rich timbre broadcasting his feelings with the simplest words. In all the years she’d known him Rhiann had never heard this distant tone.
Rhiann hugged the baby in her arms close to her chest, tears filling her eyes as she fought to keep her emotions from overwhelming her. She’d hoped the time since they’d last seen each other might have given Patrick clarity and smoothed the raw edges of his anger, but clearly not enough time had passed. Now she could only hope that he would be professional enough to put their personal grievances aside and focus on her child’s best interests.
She needed to keep a clear head today, so she stuffed her feelings away as best she could. She had known coming here was a risk, but there was no other way or she’d have explored it already.
“I need your help. Well, he needs your help. This is my son Levi. He has a heart defect, and the cardiologist at St. Thomas’ wants to do surgery to fix it. But if anyone is cutting my baby open I want it to be the best surgeon I can find.” She paused to swallow down an oversized lump in her throat. “And that’s you.”
“You expect me to save someone you love. How ironic.”
A single dark eyebrow raised as he stared down at her, his expression unreadable and as cold as marble. His eyes searched hers—for what, she didn’t know.
Just as she was sure he was about to tell her to leave, to scream at her like he had the last time she’d seen him, his gaze flicked down to the baby in her arms and the ice in his eyes melted the tiniest bit.
“Please, Dr. Scott.”
The formality felt stiff and awkward as it rolled off her tongue without the teasing tone she’d used each time she’d called him by his title in the past. Years ago they had been the closest of friends, sharing every secret with each other. They had even flirted with the idea of a relationship on an occasion or two.
But it no longer seemed appropriate to call him by his given name. Not when their friendship had crumbled on the back of accusations and misplaced blame. Their personal connection was more of a hindrance than a help in her quest to get her son the care he needed, so she kept things formal, hoping to appeal to his professional side.
His eyes snapped up to meet hers and that hint of softening was gone. “You ask too much.”
The once happy-go-lucky Patrick had earned a reputation over the last couple years for taciturnity. His white-hot talent was tempered by his ice-cold bedside manner, but he was the best pediatric cardiac surgeon in the southeast, and that fact made people overlook his brusque manner.
He’d changed three years ago—just as she had.
Rhiann remembered the caring man he’d used to be, though, and she hoped there was enough of that man left deep inside for him to agree to help. Her son’s life depended on it.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come here, but I had to try. I had to give my sweet baby every chance possible. Because he’s just a baby.”
She reached for any way to connect with the man standing before her, sensing that rejection sat poised on his lips.
“Look at him. He’s an innocent child who needs your assistance. Can you live with yourself if you don’t at least try to help him?”
“I’ll have my partner—”
“I didn’t come here for your partner. And even though I know he’s an excellent surgeon, I refuse to let you pass Levi off to Clay. Because I came here for the best surgeon I know. Not for second-best.”
He muttered a curse, so low it was barely perceptible, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You know if he needs surgery we’ll be seeing each other a lot over the coming weeks and months? Do you know what seeing you that often is going to do to me?”
Clearly not a single thing had changed between them. He still hated her. But that fact changed nothing about her mission today.
Emotions threatened to clog her throat and Rhiann coughed a bit to clear it. She swiped at a hot tear that had leaked from her eye and run down her cheek. With a hard inhalation she tried to lock those feelings away, because she needed to keep a cool head. She had to convince Patrick to help Levi.
“Whatever you think I did or didn’t do, that was in the past and between us. It has nothing to do with my son. I’ve run that day through my head no less than a thousand times, but there’s nothing I could have done that would have changed anything. I can’t change the past, but you can change Levi’s future. You can give him a future.”
His brows furrowed, Patrick pressed his lips together tightly, but her words must have touched something in the man she’d once known because he was pulling his stethoscope from around his neck.
“Let me take a look at him, run a few tests, and we’ll go from there. His records from his previous doctors haven’t been transferred yet, and I’d like to review those as well.”
“That’s all I ask.”
Rhiann’s heart thudded in her chest as Patrick sat on a rolling stool and pushed it over to listen to Levi’s heart. His hand brushed hers, warm despite his cold manner, as he moved the stethoscope gently over her son’s back. He sat close, his knee bumping into her thigh when he shifted to listen to Levi’s chest.
She inhaled sharply at the touch and he looked up at the sound, their gazes meeting over Levi’s head. The spark that fired up in his eyes brought back a time when distance between them hadn’t existed and their lives had been far easier, and she wished they could return to the easy-going camaraderie of those days.
The exam room suddenly shrank in size as new strain filled the space and fire warred with the ice in Patrick’s eyes.
The silence amped up the tension until finally he snapped back to the present enough to speak. “What tests has he had done? And how recently?”
“Most recently he’s had chest X-rays and an EKG. Two weeks ago.”
Rhiann swallowed hard. Her own medical training made this harder, because as a paramedic she knew enough to know that Levi’s heart condition was really bad.
“They told me Levi had a heart murmur when he was born—but a lot of babies have murmurs, you know? So, I was watching it, but it only kept getting worse. Then he started turning blue, and I knew it was more than just a murmur. I pushed and pushed until we saw a specialist. Six months ago he had a shunt put in that was supposed to help. But, as you can see from his coloring, it’s not enough. I’m not even sure the shunt has helped at all.”
“I’m not sure it has either.”
Patrick rolled the stool over to his computer and Rhiann breathed deeply for the first time since she’d made the appointment to see him. The keys clicked and clacked beneath Patrick’s nimble fingers as he made some notes on Levi’s chart.
He spoke without looking at her. “You might want to have Pete with you for the tests, for emotional support. How’s he handling all this, anyway?”
“I have no idea. Pete sent me divorce papers shortly after Levi was born. I haven’t seen or heard from him since before Levi had his shunt put in. Last I heard he had moved back home to California and was living near his parents. Despite loving all the music here, you know he always hated Nashville. Not close enough to the water for him. And once he gave up on the idea of a music career—well, I’m afraid it’s just me and Levi now.”
Patrick spun on the stool and stared at her for a minute. “I didn’t know,” he finally acknowledged.
“Well, now you do.”
Patrick had never liked Pete, so it would surely make him happy to hear that he’d been right when he’d warned her it would never last. The teensiest bit of joy flashed in his eyes and his lips curled up momentarily before he brought his emotions back under the icy veneer.
Her spine stiffened as she waited for the I told you so from her former friend.
“What happened?”
She sighed and let an abbreviated version of the story slip past her lips—a story she’d told more than once. “I had a hard time getting pregnant. We needed help from a donor. Pete never really connected with the thought of a baby that wasn’t his biological child, and... Well, when the news came in that Levi wasn’t absolutely perfect, that he had a heart problem, Pete just couldn’t escape fast enough.”
Levi was her family now. The only person in the world she had to love and to love her in return. She didn’t need a man like Pete. She didn’t need anyone at all except Levi. And for Levi she’d cross as many rivers and boundaries as she had to in order to get him the help he needed.
Right now Levi needed the surgeon sitting in front of her, and she was definitely crossing over the boundary lines he’d thrown up between them. Not just crossing them, but stomping on them and maybe setting them on fire for good measure.
Patrick snorted. “If only someone had told you that loser wasn’t worth your time...”
Despite expecting the rebuke, the frigidness in his tone shocked her. Rhiann blinked away more tears. The man sitting before her bore little resemblance to the friend she’d once known. That man would never have spoken to her with such vehemence.
She hugged Levi closer, knowing she couldn’t leave here without Patrick agreeing to help her son, and determined to take whatever Patrick felt he had to dish out in order to make that happen.
Very little in her life had come easily, and if there was one thing she knew it was how to stay strong and fight for what mattered. Levi was worth every fight she’d faced already, and he’d remain worth any fights there were to come.
The baby squeaked in protest as she unconsciously tightened her grip on him as she stiffened up her resolve. She eased her hold and rested her cheek on the top of Levi’s head, murmuring an apology.
She’d surprised Patrick, based on how his body stiffened beneath her hand when she reached over and put her hand on his white-cotton-clad forearm. His arm was warm beneath her fingers, which was surprising, since she’d almost expected his arm to feel like solid ice to match his demeanor.
“You can fix him, right?”
Emotions rolled over Patrick. Waves of anger swirled around spikes of sympathy, and even a hint of something he didn’t want to put a name to. He shut his feelings down and didn’t allow himself the luxury of emotions.
No feelings meant no pain. And if anyone had ever perfected the art of depriving themselves of all emotion it was Patrick.
He pushed the stool back away from the teary-eyed blonde and her tiny son before the sweet scent of vanilla and apricots that wafted from her overwhelmed his sensibilities and made him do something stupid.
Like pull her into his arms and whisper reassurances about her son’s future that he wasn’t sure he could fulfill. Or kiss her to see if she still used the strawberry lip gloss he’d been so desperate to taste once upon a time.
He cleared his throat and pulled up the cold professionalism that had served him well these last few years. No matter how good Rhiann smelled, no matter how many sparks shot up from his arm at her simple touch, he would not allow himself to think of her that way—not her, not after what she’d done.
“I don’t want to make any promises until I see exactly what we’re looking at. But I don’t like what I’m hearing. You have to know that Levi’s in poor condition.”
From what he’d heard of the little guy’s heart, surgery was almost a guarantee. But promises were wasted words when he was talking about a heart the size of a plum. And, with their past, if Rhiann had sought him out, surely she already knew things were bad.
“I can’t lose him,” she whispered, her lips feathering across the baby’s forehead. The shadows in her eyes darkened as she processed his words. “He’s all I have. Please, help him.”
A mother’s love visibly permeated her every move. It had brought her here today, despite knowing she’d have to face him again. That courage ripped open something deep in Patrick’s chest, and he knew it would take more than a hastily slapped-on bandage to patch the gaping hole Rhiann’s reappearance in his life had rent.
He stood abruptly, the stool rolling back into the wall with a rattling thud that echoed in the quiet stillness of the exam room. Fighting back the emotion that Rhiann kissing her child had triggered, he snapped out a quick response. “Levi needs an echo and a heart catherization. Once we get the results of those, we can go from there. I’ll have my nurse schedule the tests.”
Leaving the door to slam shut behind his rushed exit, Patrick strode down the hall to the nurses’ station. He shoved the laptop across the counter. “Schedule these tests for Exam Three and get them out of here now.”
He turned toward his office, heedless of the stares coming from his staff, but he didn’t miss the muttered conversation behind him.
“I wonder what the mom in three said that turned the temp down on the Ice Castle? Geez...”
“Right? I didn’t know he could get any colder.”
He ignored their words and walked away.
Thankfully, Levi had been his last patient of the day. Shutting the door, Patrick leaned back against the smooth wood and closed his eyes, trying to shove all the pain back into the depths of his mind. He tugged at the tie around his neck, loosening the silk that threatened his air supply.
Nothing could have prepared him for Rhiann’s return to his life.
Nothing.
Inhaling deeply, he focused on the abstract painting behind his desk. His late wife had painted the simple lines, with bold and contrasting colors, to help ground him when he found himself overwhelmed by the emotions and heartbreak that came with being a pediatric heart surgeon. Mallory had been deeply aware of his need to keep his environment outside the operating room calm. She’d known him better than he’d known himself at times.
He followed the lines across the canvas with his eyes, from light to dark, then back to light, while he took several slow, deep breaths.
He had to pull it together.
His nerve endings were twitching at the memories assaulting his consciousness, overpowering his present with painful reminders of the past.
Of all the people to walk into his practice today, it had had to be Rhiann—the one person he’d never wanted to see again. He’d wanted to rage at her and have her removed from his sight. He’d wanted to pull her into his arms and find out just what her perfectly pink lips tasted like.
There was just something about her... Something that had always fascinated him almost as much as it had angered him. Rhiann had been his first crush, his unattainable first love, but they’d never been on the same page when it came to a relationship. Then he’d met Mallory, and Rhiann’s role as his best friend had been locked in.
At least until she’d betrayed his trust...
And now she had to be the first woman to catch his interest in three years.
The dark shadows under her eyes told him she wasn’t sleeping, and he didn’t have to wonder why. The way her clothes hung off a frame much thinner than he remembered had brought back protective instincts he would rather not have had reawakened.
Just for that he wanted to hate Rhiann.
Hate her for making him feel.
He’d tried not to notice how Levi’s illness was affecting her. They weren’t friends anymore and it shouldn’t matter to him at all that she’d lost the dead weight from her life by divorcing that idiot Pete.
But it did matter.
Too much.
He’d almost told her to get out.
Almost.
But then he’d looked down at the little boy in her arms and found himself unable to banish her from his life once more. When he’d opened his mouth to tell her to go he’d heard himself say instead that they’d run some tests. Why? Because the blue tint to her tiny son’s skin reminded him of who he was and why Rhiann had come back into his life. And, regardless of how Rhiann had betrayed him, he couldn’t take all that resentment out on an innocent baby. Even if he wanted to hurt her like she’d hurt him, he couldn’t bring himself to say no to Levi.
Instead of being a robust and active toddler, the frail eighteen-month-old Levi was the size of a nine-month-old. His little heart wasn’t pumping right and his every breath seemed a struggle.
He hadn’t got out of Rhiann’s lap to run around the exam room. He hadn’t crinkled the paper on the table with delighted giggles. He hadn’t torn pages from the books and magazines. No, he’d only sat in Rhiann’s arms and barely reacted to the exam.
Levi was a very sick little boy who urgently needed Patrick’s help. And he’d help Levi. But not because he was Rhiann’s son. He’d help Levi because it was the right thing to do, both as a physician and as a human being. He’d help Levi and then Rhiann could get out of his life once more, like he wanted.
Seeing Levi snuggle into Rhiann’s embrace had triggered a heated assault on his emotions. The wall of ice surrounding Patrick’s heart had thickened again, though, when he’d read Levi’s birthdate on the chart. It was exactly two years later than his own daughter’s due date.
But his sweet little Everly had never drawn a breath.
Everly would never snuggle into his embrace.
And the woman who had just begged him to save her son’s life had been the one who’d cost him everything.
With a single angry gesture he swept everything from his desk into the floor. Files and stationery fluttered down without much sound, but the metal organizer tray clattered as it hit the floor and bounced.
A tentative knock preceded a soft, “Are you okay in there, Dr. Scott?”
“Leave me alone,” he snarled in response.
The “Jerk...” his nurse muttered was only just audible.
He sank down onto the floor and leaned against the door. Taking some deep breaths, he stared at the platinum band on his left hand. His whispered words were too soft for anyone outside to hear.
“I miss you so much, Mallory. I don’t know how to go on without you.”
