Her One-Night Secret
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Traci Douglass
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CHAPTER ONE
FIRE CAPTAIN STACY WILLIAMS climbed out of the back of the fire truck just as soon as it halted beneath the ambulance bay of Key West General Hospital, along with most of the rescue crew. They’d only left a skeleton staff back at the firehouse in case of other emergency calls coming in, as per protocol. Everyone else was here because one of their own was on a stretcher today.
She trailed behind the EMTs wheeling in Assistant Chief Reed Parker, unable to look away from Reed’s too-pale face. The guy had been with the department for more than two decades, dedicating his life to protecting the good people of Key West, but today the father of three was the one who needed saving.
“What’s the rundown?” one of the ER docs said as they lowered the gurney from the back of the ambulance. Stacy’s focus remained steady on Reed, not looking up or budging as noise from the controlled chaos of the busy trauma department inside leaked out each time the automatic doors whooshed open then closed.
“Forty-one-year-old firefighter with Key West FD,” one of the EMTs, Jackson Durand, said. “Riding his motorcycle and thrown from the bike, no loss of consciousness on scene. Obvious open left femur fracture.”
Reed moaned loudly then and tried to get up, but Jackson held him in place with a hand on his chest. Stacy’s heart went out to the guy. Reed prized his bike and rode to escape the stress of the job. To have this happen doing something he loved was devastating. They all clambered inside then down a corridor to the left toward one of the open treatment bays.
“Sir,” the ER doc said, leaning over Reed as he stepped in beside Jackson, his back to Stacy. “Can you tell me your name?”
They transferred Reed from the gurney to the hospital bed, and one of the nurses lifted the sheet covering his lower body to look at the wound. “What’s wrong with my leg?” he groaned, and Stacy’s heart thudded hard in her chest. “It hurts so bad.”
“Your leg is broken, sir,” the doctor said, placing his stethoscope on the man’s chest and listening before continuing. “Pretty badly, I’m afraid. But we’re going to take good care of you.” He nodded to Jackson, then took over the EMT’s position at the patient’s bedside. “Okay, we’ve got a good airway here. Good breath sounds bilaterally. Sir, can you open your eyes again for me? Looks like you’re getting drowsy. Reed, can you wiggle your left toes for me?”
Reed screamed, writhing on the bed. “Argh! It hurts, it hurts. I can’t. I can’t. My leg hurts so bad.”
“Blood pressure?” the doctor asked the nurse across the gurney.
“Seventy over forty, Doc.”
Stacy stood with the rest of her crew in the hallway outside the treatment bay, close enough to hear what was being done and said but out of the way of the important staff. As the assessment of Reed’s condition continued, her gut knotted tighter in empathy for her coworker. An open compound fracture of the femur would hurt like hell, yet the hospital wouldn’t be able to give him anything for the pain because of his low blood pressure. It could lead to even more issues, maybe even kill him if Reed stopped breathing all together.
Not good. Not good at all.
“Right,” the doctor said, his slight accent snagging something in Stacy’s memory before she waved it off. Key West was a true melting pot of people, between the locals and the vacationers and the refugees who came here for a better life. Just because that deep voice reminded her of a long-ago night on the beach, when a handsome Cuban stranger had wooed her into one night of passion that led to her son, Miguel, didn’t mean it was the same guy. Couldn’t be. The man she’d known was halfway around the world by now, location unknown...
“Let’s give him six units of blood, stat!” the doctor said from the treatment bay, jarring Stacy out of the past and back to the high-stakes reality. “Heart rate’s high but blood pressure’s low. Get ortho on the phone, stat, please. This man needs to be in an operating room now. I don’t know if that leg is salvageable, but right now the primary concern is stopping the bleeding and saving his life.”
Stacy stepped back, head lowered, as the curtain swished open and the doctor walked out. She caught a hint of alcohol from the hand sanitizer he used as he passed by her, his rubber soles squeaking on the shiny tile floor as he headed to the nurses’ station down the hall. He was tall, maybe six inches above her own five-foot-six height, with broad shoulders that filled out his green scrubs nicely. She still had no idea what he looked like, though, since she hadn’t seen his face. She and the rest of the crew knew most of the docs around here, as they often assisted the ambulance crews on emergency runs since they were cross-trained as EMTs. Most times, fire arrived before the ambulance when 911 was called.
One of the nurses she knew, Jenny, walked out of the treatment bay, and Stacy plied her for information about Reed while Jenny typed into a computer against the wall. “How is he?”
“Not good,” Jenny said. “He’s not responding to the blood we’re giving him. Doc’s sending him up to surgery to see what’s happening internally. We’ll know more after that.”
Jenny took off again, and Stacy and the rest of her crew wandered back down the corridor toward the waiting area, passing by the doc on the phone as they went. She did her best not to eavesdrop, but given it was a friend of hers whose life was in peril, that was pretty much impossible. Stacy wasn’t sure whom he was talking to, but she was able to glean a few more details as she passed by.
“...yes. Fireman thrown from his motorcycle. Known femur fracture, suspected pelvic fracture. No. I’m not sure, but he’s not responding to transfusions. That’s my worry, too. Maybe an undiagnosed solid organ injury. Liver or spleen. Or perhaps internal bleeding from the pelvic fracture. We can’t be certain until you get in there. Saving the leg is the least of our worries...”
Oh boy. Stacy sat in one of the hard plastic chairs and stared down at her hands.
Please, God. Please let Reed be okay. Please.
She couldn’t imagine having that conversation with his wife, his kids. Telling them their father had died. Images from her own childhood, the day her mother had told Stacy that her dad was gone, flashed in her head.
Her dad hadn’t died. He’d just walked out on them, but still.
She’d never seen the man again either way, so it didn’t much matter.
The doctor hung up, and Stacy pushed to her feet. Enough. She needed to find out what was happening before Reed’s family showed up demanding answers. As captain and the ranking officer on scene, it would be her duty to keep the family and her team informed.
Before she could reach the doc, whose long legs carried him surprisingly fast toward the stairwell, the automatic doors swished open once more and Reed’s wife, Annette, ran in with their three teenaged kids.
“What’s happened? Where’s my husband?” Annette said in a panicked rush. “Is he okay? I told him not to ride that damned bike of his so fast around the curves. I told him he was going to kill himself one day if he...” Her words caught on a sob, and she collapsed into Stacy’s arms. “Oh God. I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t. If anything happens to my Reed, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Stacy led the crying woman and the kids to a more private area down the hall, near the elevators, to tell her what she knew, which was precious little at the moment until she talked to the doctor in charge. She looked up and spotted him still near the nurses’ station, talking to Jackson. Good. Maybe if she hurried she could still catch him before he went up to surgery, or wherever he was going.
“Hang on, Annie,” Stacy said, gripping the near-hysterical woman by the shoulders. “Let me see if I can catch the doctor real quick and find out what’s happening.”
She looked up again and froze.
Not because the doctor was gone, but because she finally got a look at his face. A face she’d never thought she’d see again. She blinked, stared, the phantom smells of sand and surf surrounding her. The sounds of the ER morphed into the crash of waves. They’d been young and drunk and stupid in lust with each other, both looking for a good time, nothing more.
She’d ended up with more, though. A life-altering more that had given her more joy and sorrow and unexpected gifts that she’d ever imagined. A son she’d never expected. A son his father knew nothing about.
Oh no.
Her breath seized, and her chest ached. Time slowed as her eyes locked with his hazel ones, the same caramel color she remembered from that long-ago night on the beach.
It was him.
Luis.
Then, as quickly as the spell had fallen, it shattered, and things sped up. He pushed through the stairwell door and was gone, looking as shell-shocked as she felt. Stacy was left staring at Jackson, who gave her an inquiring look before going back to his paperwork.
Snap out of it, she scolded herself. Breathe.
She couldn’t afford this right now. Not with Reed fighting for his life and an Emergency Response Team meeting on her agenda in a little over an hour’s time.
Dammit. She was supposed to meet her friend Lucy Miller and take her to the meeting. It was Lucy’s first time and she was anxious as it was, and Stacy didn’t want to make that worse.
“Come on,” she said to Annette, ushering her and the kids into a private consult room nearby. “You guys sit here for a little while until we find out more, okay?” She hugged Annie, then excused herself. “I’ll be back. I need to take care of something.” Stacy headed out the door then turned back to her crew, who were sitting with the Parkers. “Watch over them. Text me if anything changes.”
Then she was out the door and heading for the waiting area where she was supposed to meet Lucy, but nope. No sign of her friend. Dammit. Stacy checked everywhere, even went up to the children’s ward but found no Lucy or her service dog, Sam.
She went back to the nurses’ station, thinking she’d ask Jackson, but he was gone now, too.
Great. Her day was going from bad to worse.
It can’t be. And yet...it was.
He knew that as surely as he knew the patient he was watching through the glass of the observation room upstairs in the OR would still have a long way to go before he was out of the woods. The surgery could stop the bleeding and stabilize his condition. That was the good news. The bad news was afterward they’d still need to evaluate that leg, wash out the wound to get rid of all the gravel and denim and bits of bone that had been broken off and were embedded with it. Then the ortho surgeon would apply a fixation device to stabilize his broken femur. Unfortunately, when Luis had checked in the ER, there was no pulse in the patient’s left foot, and from what he could hear through the intercom system from the surgical suite, there still wasn’t now, even after an hour on the table. Which could signify two bigger injuries—compromised blood supply to the leg or possible nerve damage to the area.
Yes, the man’s life was much more secure at that point, but at what cost?
It was a question that plagued Luis as he went back downstairs for the ERT meeting. He was already running late, which was nothing new. Schedules had to be flexible when you packed as much into them as Luis did. He liked to stay busy, stay productive, stay focused on his goals.
After all, people had died to make his life today possible. People like his birth parents.
He owed it to them to accomplish as much as possible for as many people as possible in the time he had. It was a philosophy that Luis lived by and the idea that kept him circling back to that original question, usually late at night, when he lay awake in his bed, alone.
At what cost?
Luis wasn’t a man who sat around feeling sorry for himself. Nope. He was blessed, and he knew it.
He pushed out into the ER on the first floor and checked in at the nurses’ station before grabbing his lab coat and heading down the hall to the conference room where the meeting was being held. He nodded greetings to several colleagues along the way before easing his way into the crowded space, where the speakers had already begun.
Truthfully, he was proud as hell of his adopted brother, Jackson, for taking on the incident commander position for this latest hurricane. His brother was the hardest-working EMT in the area, and the promotion and recognition that came with it had been a long time coming for Jackson. He hoped everything went to plan and his brother got the new job he wanted. No one deserved it more than Jackson, but then, life didn’t always give us what we deserved.
Silently, he moved in beside his brother now and leaned back against the wall, grateful for the dimmed lights in the room as he stared up at the podium and the presenter.
Stacy Williams.
The name suited her—steady, sure, sensible, sexy as hell yet completely unassuming.
It was that last one that had his throat constricting with adrenaline as long-ago memories assailed him. Still hushed, still shadowed. But then they’d been on the beach, just the two of them beneath the moonlight, huddled on a blanket, entwined in each other’s arms, the stars the only witness as they’d made love on the sand dune and his world had been rocked forever.
That had been the night before he’d left to go to Myanmar. The night when the future had seemed so uncertain and the only tangible thing he’d had to hold on to had been her. If he closed his eyes, he could still remember the feel of her silky skin against him, hear her soft cries as she came undone in his arms, taste the sweetness of her kisses on his lips...
“Everything okay?” Jackson asked, giving him some serious side-eye.
“Fine,” Luis said, shaking off the unwanted warmth inside him. It had been one night, a drunken fling. It didn’t mean anything at all. Even if it kind of felt like it did, at least to him. He wasn’t really a one-night-stand kind of man. Wasn’t a relationship guy at all, honestly. He didn’t have the time.
Too busy taking care of others. Always putting others’ wants and needs ahead of his own.
He was a doctor. That’s what he did. Who he was.
“And now I’ll turn things back over to IC Jackson Durand,” Stacy said before heading back to her seat, her gaze briefly meeting Luis’s before flickering away again.
Luis’s gut clenched. She recognized him. She knew.
They’d never spoken after that night. He’d left the US early the next morning on his flight, and she’d gone back to Miami, he’d assumed. They’d both gotten on with their lives, obviously. But in that brief meeting of their eyes, he’d seen her blue ones widen slightly and Luis knew she’d been remembering that night, too. Before he caught himself, he was moving across the room to stand closer to where she was sitting. He had no intention of rekindling old flames, but he did want to talk to her, to dispel the awkward tension between them, especially since he’d seen her earlier with the injured firefighter and chances were they might run into each other again.
After all, they were both on the ERT team and Luis was coordinating the ER to handle any casualties the storm might cause. A good working relationship with the fire department was key to any response plan. He was just doing his job.
And perhaps, if he told himself that enough times, he might actually believe it.
First, though, Luis needed to get through this damned meeting.
Which seemed to drag on and on and on.
He got up and gave his presentation about the hospital’s contingency plans and triage protocols during disasters. With Key West and the surrounding islands in the hot zone for hurricanes, it wasn’t uncommon for them to experience several each season. This year had been worse, though, with more named storms than any on record so far, and it didn’t appear that it would let up anytime soon.
When he was done, Luis made his way back over to where Stacy sat with another woman, Lucy Miller. Luis recognized her and her therapy dog from the days they made their rounds upstairs in the children’s ward. He had to admit he was a bit shocked to see Lucy here, given her anxiety disorders, but then, he of all people should know that being neurodivergent didn’t preclude one from doing whatever one put one’s mind to. In fact, for him at least, his mild case of Asperger’s syndrome actually benefited his work as a doctor, made him more focused, better able to retain and use information about his patients. And yes, sometimes the social aspects were still a struggle for him, even after years of adapting, but people loved to talk about themselves, so as long as he kept that spotlight pointed away from himself and firmly on them, he was fine.
“All right, folks,” Jackson said from the podium. “That’s it for today. Please keep one eye on the weather reports, and if predictions change, I’ll let everyone know and we’ll meet again. Thank you.”
People began to file out of the room, and Stacy whispered something to Lucy before standing, pushing her chair in then heading for the door. It was now or never, and Luis’s pulse kicked up a notch.
He was hardly some fumbling schoolboy, unsure and untested around women, but for some reason the thought of talking to this woman made him nervous as hell. Maybe because he’d relived that night five years ago in his head so many times during the lonely days in between that he’d built it into something completely magical and fantastic. Maybe reality would never equal the dream. Maybe this was all a horrible mistake.
Before he could stop himself, Luis touched her arm just as she reached the door and she turned, the end of her long blond ponytail brushing the back of his hand and sending a slight shiver through him. Her blue eyes widened, just as pretty and deep azure as he remembered, and just like that, Luis felt like he was drowning. He choked out words past his tight vocal cords. “It is you.”
