Airborne Emergency
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Olivia Gates
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CHAPTER ONE
“OF ALL names, my new boss had to be a Vidal.”
Cassandra St James winced. She was talking to herself out loud, sounding like a hissing cobra, no less. No wonder the woman ahead of her in the queue had given her that funny look.
What was really funny was that just his name still raised her hackles this way. Brought every sort of fierce nastiness she thought she’d outgrown bubbling to the surface again.
So their mission leader, the man they were transiting in Madrid Airport to pick up, was blighted at birth with ‘the name’. Him and a million other men in Spanish-speaking communities. Her Vidal was an Arroyo Martinez. He must be in some hyper-advanced surgical center, performing million-dollar esthetic miracles. Her new boss was a Santiago, and he was devoting three months to a grueling, payless humanitarian mission.
She shook her head, paid for her breakfast, tossed her mane of curls back. Better focus on something else. Her life’s much-needed new direction, for example. That began today. Her plans to explore new medical frontiers, to break the monotony and the dead ends, were in motion at last. And from the way she saw—saw...
Eyes. Steel and silver. They slammed into her across the huge, bustling cafeteria and held her prisoner. Wouldn’t let her look anywhere else. Not even at the face they belonged to.
Her heart lurched and the next scheduled breath just wouldn’t come.
Whoa! What was that? She didn’t do that. Didn’t do instant overwhelming attraction and X-rated thoughts. Or delayed ones, for that matter. Didn’t go hot and gooey when a man looked at her. And the man was just looking at her.
OK, so no one had ever looked at her that way—ogled her blatantly, sure, especially since she’d set foot in this land of self-appointed Latin lovers—but this...this devouring was something else altogether.
People passed in front of her, blocking her vision, severing the connection.
Oh, thank you! She made use of the time out, reached one of the elegant plate-glass tables, swore softly when she splashed cappuccino over her French pastry.
Don’t look. She did. She had to, to find out just what that bolt of chemical reaction was all about. Bodies still blocked her view. Then suddenly she had a clear shot of him again and...he was no longer on the other side of the cafeteria!
He was cutting his way through the packed crowds, head and shoulders above other people. Coming to her. Oh, wow!
Her mind stuttered to a standstill as his purposeful stride eliminated the gap between them, then kicked off again, in a jumble.
He was going to talk to her. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, yes! But what would he say? What would she say? She must look hideous. Her hair was a worse-than-usual mess. Not even lip gloss. She must still be puffed up with that horrible deathlike sleep on board the plane—not that those lethal eyes said anything, but—
A bloodcurdling shriek went through her like a scythe.
Cassandra jerked around, but not before she saw his eyes snapping from consuming to concerned as they refocused behind her, searching out the source of distress.
The shrieks continued, rising to a manic pitch. People were running, some away from the source of disturbance. That added to her confusion until she remembered where they were. In an airport screams might easily be interpreted as some sort of danger. Her first impulse was to rush to help. It must be all her medical training, and probably her knight-to-the-rescue genes as well.
Shouts in many languages echoed. She made out enough to know there’d been an accident. Someone—a child—was injured, unconscious.
She was running by now, towards the milling crowd. He was ahead of her, his growls cutting a clear path to the victim in seconds.
It wasn’t as easy for her. The crowd closed up again in his wake, didn’t part for her as it had for him. She had to shove and elbow away layer after layer of onlookers, trying to get to the object of their horrified fascination.
Her shouts of, “Let me pass. I’m a doctor,” didn’t make any impression on the predominantly Spanish audience. Then she heard his voice again, snapping something in Spanish, and suddenly she had a front-row view of the emergency.
A hysterical woman being restrained, dragged away. A motionless boy on the floor, or at least a head of golden hair. The rest of him was obscured by the man’s huge crouching body. He was already administering CPR.
She groaned. So the boy had arrested. If the man could judge that. And he’d volunteered to resuscitate him—probably on the strength of a technique picked up from some medical TV drama.
Falling to her knees beside him, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Señor? I can take over while you make sure an ambulance is on its way. I’m a doctor.”
He withdrew to deliver cardiac compressions, didn’t even look at her. “I got that already.”
She started. His voice—a bass rasp that was just as potent as the rest of him. Concise, cultured. And American. American?
Later. Focus! “Great, so if you’ll just...” Her eyes fell on the boy’s face before the man swooped to deliver another breath and the words stopped in her throat. The boy’s mouth—it was burned!
Fighting off the wave of horror that years of handling the worst medicine had to offer hadn’t eradicated, Cassandra’s eyes darted around, summing up the situation. A boy of less than three. A pretty plastic tree a few feet away with dangling electric toy planets. They’d been glowing minutes ago. Not any more.
The boy must have bitten the electric cord to pluck one off.
Her stomach heaved again. The center of the burn encompassed both lips in a two-inch, grayish-white, depressed area: the current’s point of entry. Electrical burns were far worse than thermal ones as the current arcing through the tissues damaged everything along their path down to the bone. This one, when it healed, would look awful and result in horrible complications, from mouth contraction to tongue adhesions to bone involvement, causing everything from disfigurement to drooling to speech impairment.
But she was way ahead of herself here. No point worrying about those burns now. Keeping the boy’s circulation going and oxygen reaching his brain was the number-one priority. She’d better take over and make sure the kid got the best chance. This guy might have taken a course in resuscitation, but young children needed a totally different resuscitation protocol than adults. What would be perfect technique for an adult, or even an older child, would crush the boy’s chest with the hard, two-handed compressions, or burst his lungs with the forced ventilation. Even if he knew enough not to be too forceful, he would probably not know that the 80 compressions and the 16 breaths per minute of the usual CPR would be too few to make any difference.
“Sir...” The man withdrew from a breath and she noticed his technique for the first time. It shut her up again.
One large hand pressed down with rapid, shallow compressions. She counted them—at this rate, they’d be an optimum 120 per minute. The other hand had two fingers locating the right position on the sternum, just below the nipple line. The five-to-one ratio of compressions to breaths resulted in 25 breaths per minute, delivered with just the right force. Everything done to the letter of advanced life support protocols for a child that age.
No—not TV-trained after all. This man knew what he was doing. And then some.
Feeling redundant all of a sudden, she fell back on her heels, taking stock, her heart itching at the idea that the man was adding further injury to the mutilated tissues every time he delivered a breath into the boy’s inert lungs. Not that that could be helped.
The mother’s wailing filtered through to her from a distance. What she must be feeling—the sheer horror and despair! But, then, she hadn’t been watching her little one closely enough and she... Cassandra’s censorious thoughts stumbled, hot shame squashing them.
Look who’s being holier than thou, she thought. Safeguarding kids every minute of the day was one of life’s impossibilities. She could vouch for that. What about the right-on-his-head dive Aaron had taken out of his crib, in front of both Amanda and herself? Luckily, he had been OK. No thanks to them.
Her focus returned to the crisis. So the man was delivering first-rate CPR. Working with the presumption it would prove effective, she should assess the boy’s other injuries—other burns, any limb angulations. The generalized muscular contraction the jolt must have caused could have been violent enough to fracture bones.
The next second, coughing brought her out of her absorbed examination. The man’s coughing.
Still coughing yet not missing a beat, he looked up and she again felt as the boy must have felt the moment that devastating current had arced through his body.
“You a real doctor?” he panted.
Her mind was shut down, but her smart mouth must have been on auto. “No, I’m just a surgeon.”
He came up from the next breath with the banked fire in his eyes flaring, promising sensual retribution. Later, they said. Now he only rasped, “OK, Dr Surgeon—take over respiration.”
She swooped down for the next breath, cringing at having to bear down on the boy’s burnt lips but forcing herself to form a tight seal over his mouth. The man immediately set up a perfect rhythm of compressions with her, then went into another coughing fit.
“Good thing you’re here,” he gasped once he’d brought himself under control. “No reason to inoculate the kid with more of my resistant strains.”
OK, not just a highly trained bystander, then. That was doctor-talk.
“That is,” the man added, his voice dipping lower, “if we manage to save him.”
Cassandra’s heart lurched. “We will!” she gasped after the last breath.
“Hold that thought.” He looked up at one of the men standing above her and fired rapid Spanish at him. The bystander rushed to get his cellphone out of his jacket pocket then, following his directions, called a number and placed the phone to his ear. He shot out a string of what sounded like commands into the phone, then nodded to the man, who removed the phone and placed it back into his pocket.
Curiosity overwhelmed her. Who had he called? And how come he sounded perfectly American one moment then clearly Spanish the next? No time, and no breath left to ask. From then on they resumed their efforts in silence, snatching eloquent glances every time she raised her head from a breath. At least, she thought they were eloquent. She felt they were exchanging their gratitude for sharing the massive responsibility with each other. Admitting their strong attraction.
She could also just be hyperventilating.
But she hadn’t been when that bolt had hit her a few minutes ago. All right, so she had been hit by bolts like that before. But she hadn’t been a thirty-year-old then. Merely a stupid teenager who’d just discovered her sexuality and had gone about picking the most disastrous choice to be the focus of her infatuation...
Rushing feet announced the paramedics’ arrival, breaking into her untimely musings. How long had it taken them to make it here? And who had the man called? She’d lost track of time, felt as if she’d been fighting for the kid’s life for a day— drowning in his eyes all her life...
His curt words brought her back to the crisis. “Get a bag-valve mask, a cardiac monitor, the defibrillator, and cut his clothes!”
Yes, definitely a doctor. And he wasn’t relinquishing their victim to the paramedics’ care. Good—she wasn’t about to either. She was seeing this through.
“But it’s been over fifteen minutes, and if he’s still in arrest—” one of the paramedics started, but the man cut him short.
“I started CPR almost immediately.”
“But still...”
“Did no one report he’d been electrocuted?”
That stopped the paramedic’s arguments. In electrocution, since the heart had no underlying disease causing the arrest, resuscitation should continue for far longer than for any other cause of arrest. There was always hope an electrocuted victim could revive after protracted resuscitation efforts.
She delivered one last breath before snatching the bag-valve mask from a female paramedic’s hands, sealing it over the boy’s face and beginning positive pressure ventilation with 100 per cent oxygen. The man stopped the cardiac compressions to attach the cardiac monitor’s electrodes to the boy’s chest.
Following through with her ventilatory assessment, Cassandra grabbed a stethoscope and listened to the chest. “Chest rising well, equal air entry over both lungs.”
The man nodded, finger on the boy’s carotid artery, eyes on the monitor. He added his own assessment. “Still pulseless, though—heart’s in ventricular fibrillation.” He turned to the paramedics.
“Charge the defibrillator.”
In seconds they’d handed him the paddles of the defibrillator.
“Everyone, clear!” he shouted.
The first shock produced no change in heart rhythm.
“Increase the charge,” he ordered.
A second then a third shock still produced no effect. And three shocks were the limit at a time.
“Back to CPR, then,” Cassandra said. “Time for venous access and intubation.”
“Yes.” He made way for the female paramedic to take over cardiac compressions. “Which do you want to handle?”
She didn’t relish the idea of coming near the boy’s mouth again. “I’ll take venous access.”
He held her eye for a second, jolting her yet again. He understood her reluctance—sympathized? With a nod, he turned to the other paramedic. “No. 2 Miller laryngoscope, straight blade, 4.5 endotracheal tube, uncuffed.”
Whoa! Not just a doctor. A specialist of some sort. An anesthetist maybe? Whatever, the man was just too impressive altogether...
Drool over him later. Get a line into that little boy.
He finished the intubation, slipped the ETT in place, tested its correct placement and decompressed the stomach to further aid ventilation. Everything done with staggering speed and precision. It didn’t make Cassandra feel any better about her struggle to locate a vein.
“No luck?”
She bristled at his question, brought the spurt of irritation under control and made one last attempt. No go.
“Let me do that.” He reached out to take the cannula out of her hands.
She turned on him. “You got a way to inflate his collapsed veins?” His eyebrows rose at her vehemence, his hands, too, in a conciliatory gesture. “You go ahead, then,” she muttered. “Administer epinephrine though the ETT. I’ll go for the intraosseous route.”
That hard, hot energy he emitted spiked, the explicit awareness in his eyes back in full force. Still, when he talked, he was the personification of professionalism. “0.2 mg/kg epinephrine, 1/1000 solution,” he ordered the paramedic.
Her heat rose. Her concern, too. “0.1 mg/kg is the maximum initial dose via ETT!”
“No.”
“Just no?”
“Yes.”
Overconfident, imperious. She hated that in men.
“I assume you do know what you’re doing?”
“I do.”
And she really believed he did. It was probably why overconfident imperiousness looked good on him.
She turned to the paramedic. “You have an intraosseous kit?”
“No, but we have spinal needles,” the paramedic said.
“Close enough. Get me an 18-gauge needle.” The efficient man handed it to her in two seconds flat. “Ready Ringer’s lactate solution, two bags, and giving sets while I do this.”
She located the point of insertion in the boy’s tibia, an inch above the medial malleolus in his foot, inserted the needle perpendicular to the bone with a screwing motion until it ‘gave’ when she entered the marrow cavity. A centimeter in, she stopped, removed the needle, leaving the catheter in. In seconds she had her line secure and fluids pumping into the inert boy.
“Good job. No extravasation?” her resuscitation partner asked, checking whether any fluids were leaking out of the bone. She shook her head and he said, “Better deliver the subsequent doses of epinephrine via this route, then.”
They did that and after a minute he sighed. “There’s a slight change in rhythm—no palpable pulse, though. We’ll have to shock him again.”
They went through the three-shock routine again. With the last shock, the cardiac monitor blipped the hoped-for change.
“He’s back.” The man’s expression didn’t reflect the relief in his voice. Her anxious eyes jerked to the cardiac monitor to make sure. “Sinus rhythm, 80 beats per minute. A bit slow, but we have him back.” He reached out a hand and squeezed her shoulder. “Good work.”
Relief and pleasure at his praise, at his touch, melted her tense face into a wobbly smile. One he didn’t return, the intensity back instead. His eyes went to her lips, rested there until they began to swell, open—then he turned to the crowd and said something in Spanish. Something about la madre. Telling them to allow the mother back? Cassandra had forgotten all about her. He hadn’t. Nice...
Then everything crashed back on her after the vacuum in which she’d been suspended, with only the man and the boy for company. Even the paramedics had been faceless tools of assistance. Now everything seemed to zoom into existence once again. Bystanders. The wailing mother. Then a second set of medical personnel materialized on the scene.
The man jumped to his feet, exchanged rapid conversation with one of them, and suddenly she was shoved to the side. The frantic mother hurled herself at her toddler, people again restrained her, the newcomers descended on the scene and implemented the protocols of moving a critically injured victim with total efficiency.
Then just as suddenly, the whole crisis receded, leaving her behind.
He was leaving her behind!
He was walking away with a man who probably was the pediatric intensivist who was taking over the case, deep in conversation. Not looking back.
In seconds all she could see of him was the back of his regal head receding out of sight as the sea of people between them thickened then obscured her vision.
As anticlimaxes went, this one was a whopper.
But what had she expected? What was there to expect? They were both waiting to catch planes that would probably take them to opposite ends of the earth. The best they could have had was an hour of—of what? And, anyway, what could possibly top what they’d just shared: dragging a life back from the brink of death? Anything from then on would have been an anticlimax. Never had she shared such an intense experience with anyone. At work she collaborated with others, saving lives, daily, but it had never been this immediate, this synergistic.
Now he was gone and the whole incredible experience was over.
She straightened, delayed reaction hitting her. It was already as if nothing had happened, the scene reverting to what it had been previously: busy morning traffic in an international airport.
So, what to do now with enough leftover adrenaline to power her for a month? How to stop it from turning on her, making her legs dough and her nerves exposed wires?
Sit down before you collapse.
Though that wasn’t such a bad idea right now. It might bring him back, then he would...would...
For heaven’s sake! Would what? What was wrong with her? She’d never reacted this way to a man before. Not since...
Her thoughts screeched to a halt again. So did her racing heart.
He was coming back.
His eager stride was eating up the space between them, as if a tape had rewound, snipping out the footage of the last explosive half-hour, resuming time at the moment before they’d heard that scream.
Now it was exclusively personal again, the fierceness of that silver gaze was too much to take head on. Heat surged in her head, cascaded all over her body. Her face had to be radiating a red as deep as her hair by now. Her eyes escaped his, only to stray over the rest of him, and— Wow!
She’d definitely missed a lot during the crisis. Everywhere she looked, every detail of his striking features and awesome physique—and the thoughts they provoked—were even more blush-worthy.
This was getting surreal. After Steve and Daniel, not to mention Rick, she wanted a man and a man’s attention like she wanted incurable acne. Anyway, they were passing ships in the night—or planes in the morning—and when it came to looking and fantasizing, she was all for handsome men. And this man wasn’t...
No. It would almost be an insult, calling him that. He was...one of a kind. Unadulterated power and maleness in human form. And now she knew the package housed as formidable a brain, his appeal shot to an all-new high. Appeal? Ha! What a lame word to label the jarring response he was wringing from her.
But something was wrong here. Very wrong. Besides feeling like a derailed train, she felt as if she knew him, as if she should know him.
Then it struck her. Hard, then harder. With the force of a jackhammer right inside her head.
No wonder she’d felt she’d known him all her life.
She had.
He was Vidal! Despicable, mercenary, cold-blooded, self-serving Vidal Arroyo Martinez. The man whose very name had been anathema to her for the past fourteen years. The user, the deserter. And that was just for starters.
He was really here. This was really him. Of all coincidences, of all places. When just an hour ago she’d been cursing her luck that she had a boss with the same first name, memories of him had come back to disturb her more than they had in years. Had the intensity of her antipathy summoned him or something?
Whatever, he was here. And he was now no more than a foot away, coming to tower over her, almost touching her. Then touching her. His thigh against her hip, his hand going to her arm, smoothing it up and down. Familiar, forward. Then his mouth was against her ear, his whisper penetrating her brain, turning it to mush.
“Miss me?”
Her heart kicked, turned. Recognizing him wasn’t making any difference, was it? His virility was overwhelming her senses, overriding her mental aversion. She should make some comeback. Cutting and condescending.
He talked first, his eyes sweeping her face, her body, until she felt he’d touched her all over. “I missed you.”
The exaggeration hit all her indignant spots. “How could you miss me? Apart from handling the emergency together, we practically haven’t met yet!”
“Oh, we’ve met all right!”
So he remembered her?
“We don’t need formalities. Even without sharing the emergency, which can’t be topped as introductions go, we met the moment our eyes did.”
Oh, boy. So this was the legendary Vidal in action. The world had turned so much, the day had come when she was on the receiving end of his devastating seduction technique. It shouldn’t be having any effect. She knew all about him, was onto his every heartless trick.
What should be and what was had nothing in common.
Oh, why did he have to sound like that? Had he always sounded like that? Opened his mouth and poured out those deepest, darkest vocal caresses?
She didn’t remember. He’d barely ever talked to her, if at all. The silent type he’d been. Not any more, it seemed.
He was going on. “Sorry I had to leave you like that. Had to discuss the little boy’s continuing care with Miguel, my assistant, about his oral burn, arrange for his follow-up and future corrective surgery. He thought it was incredible for both of us to be here, just in time to help. I think it’s more than incredible.”
“You think so? I bet you there are dozens of doctors floating around the airport. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been another couple of people.”
“Maybe, but what about us—before the emergency?”
She was already busy groping for theories to explain her shocking reaction to him, for why he’d singled her out.
He wasn’t giving her time to think. “Come on, let’s go somewhere where we can...talk.” He tugged gently on her arm, his arm going around her shoulders until he had her in the curve of his body, steering her away from the crowds.
In a minute she found herself towed into a VIP lounge, two security men holding the door open for them. Inside there were just three other people, very distinguished-looking men in thousand-dollar suits.
So the man had clout. Didn’t hesitate to throw his weight around. It figured. From his more than shady beginnings, he’d always been an opportunist, bent on climbing up as high as he could reach in the world. Over anyone. Years ago, when she’d finally stopped following his progress, and had made sure no one told her any more about him, he’d already reached the top.
He turned from closing the door and bore down on her. “I came back running, though I knew...” Those long, strong fingers, his precise surgeon’s tools, went to her hair, tucking it behind her ear, the motion intimate. Penetrating. As if he’d touched her in all her secret places. Blood whooshed in her brain, amplified by the sudden change from the hubbub of the open airport to the lounge’s soundproofed serenity. “I knew you’d wait for me.”
She sat down on the plush couch before she fell, and looked up at him as he came to stand above her.
He’d changed. As a young man he’d been incredible. Now...now he was a fully matured force of nature.
No wonder she hadn’t recognized him.
Broader, leaner. Tougher. Harsher. And those eyes—no wonder she hadn’t recognized them. She’d never really seen them behind the obscuring glasses he’d never taken off. Those were now gone. As was the raven, unruly mane, the sallow tinge of years of study and sun deprivation and the yucky facial hair of the last six years of their...relationship. Now he was all silver-laced uncompromising crop, deep bronze and clean-shaven slashed lines.
He’d changed all right, for the best. Only on the surface, no doubt. She’d bet good money the inside changes were for the worse.
If that was possible.
Another thing had changed: the way he looked at her. At their last meeting, he’d looked at her as if she’d been a human-sized parasite. Now the look in his eyes said...plenty.
It also said he still didn’t recognize her.
The Vidal Arroyo Martinez she had known would have rather been skinned alive than be within a five-mile radius of her. Let alone hit on her.
Ooh, but this was just too delicious! Her anonymity was a great weapon at the moment. No way was she passing up the chance of using it. Let her see how far he’d go if she played this game his way. If she gave him as much rope as he needed to hang himself with.
Her heart was still thumping hard enough to shake her, but her old imp had resurfaced. A dizzying mixture of resentment and excitement drove her on. She fluttered her lashes at him, the exaggerated huskiness in her voice only half pretense. “And as I did, what do you intend to do with me?”
Surprise invaded those annihilating eyes. Though it was followed by a flare of raw hunger, she saw her response had thrown him. He hadn’t expected her to be as outrageous as he was.
Oh, yes. Revenge was going to be so sweet.
