Her Denali Medicine Man

by Denise Gwen

  And I can sure as hell make him mind me, too.

  He wasn’t her boss. She was the boss.

  In a crisp voice, she said, “Let’s start the tour, shall we?”

  Well, that sure comes as an unpleasant surprise.

  As Jake escorted Sarah O’Reilly around the Tlingit Medical Clinic, he took the measure of the two sisters, and no matter how he looked at it, he found Sarah O’Reilly a puffed-up-full-of-herself Medical Doctor lacking.

  She sure does resemble her older, beautiful sister Rachel, but wow, is she unpleasant.

  She might be the doctor who issued the prescriptions, but he was the one who ran things.

  And as soon as she figured that out, the happier they’d both be.

  Well, you’re not planning to fall in love with the girl, are you? You just have to get along with her, at least until Rachel comes back from maternity leave.

  When he first heard that Rachel had a younger sister, he did dare to wonder, briefly, if the younger sister might fill up the empty space in his heart left behind when Robin Roundtree, the great love of his life, died.

  But his fond hopes were dashed the moment she walked into the facility and turned her pert little nose up at the place. Oh, he knew her type, the competitive female doctor who simply has to be the best at everything. Then he noticed the ring on her finger—it was plain, weirdly so, a simple gold band, and on the ring finger of the left hand—and he knew then they didn’t stand a chance.

  He knew the type; some rich hotshot waiting back home for the gorgeous girl to return to him, so they could get married and live their perfect, rich life.

  Let them have it.

  It didn’t matter to him; he certainly didn’t care.

  And it really was too bad, though, because she was so very pretty. Sarah’s was more to his liking, with her petite frame, her long, black hair, and those bright green eyes.

  Robin Roundtree had green eyes.

  He shook his head with irritation. Best not to think on Robin.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just got a sudden chill.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see the place, shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  She followed his lead as he took off down the corridor.

  It niggled him, at the back of his mind. He cleared his throat. “Just so you know.”

  “What?”

  “We’re planning to get authentic art into the building. We’re still a work in progress here.”

  “I see,” Sarah said.

  “Just so you know,” he added with a snide smile.

  “Really,” she said with a cool smile, “you don’t have to sell me on the facility.”

  “Oh, you’re sure about that?”

  “I’m stuck here until my sister comes back from maternity leave.”

  “Well, I’m sure Rachel will be back to work in no time at all, and then you can go back to your fancy, rich doctor husband.”

  “We’re not married yet.”

  He looked at her, saw her cheeks flaring scarlet, and realized he’d touched a nerve.

  In a low voice, one that he was sure she didn’t mean for him to hear, she muttered, “We’re not even engaged, yet.”

  “Well, I’m sure he’s counting the days till your return,” Jake said, but without rancor, for the brightness in her green eyes disturbed him, and he wondered at his cruelty.

  She recovered her composure and gazed at him, those bright green eyes glittering. “My fiancée—and thank you for mentioning him—is an oncologist, a real doctor, and not some run-of-the-mill physician’s assistant, and he’s on the short list to be named head of the pediatric oncology department.”

  Jake reared his head back, first in shock, then in anger.

  Well, I suppose I earned that.

  “It was mighty nice of your fiancée to let you help your sister out in her time of need.”

  “Yes, it was nice of him, wasn’t it?”

  And yet, there was something so appealing to her, so utterly lovely, that he couldn’t resist teasing her a little. She might be a cold fish, but she was a mighty pretty cold fish.

  “You want to know something, Dr. O’Reilly?”

  “I hate to ask, but what?”

  He took a step closer toward her. She flinched but did not withdraw.

  “If I were your fiancé, I wouldn’t let you leave my sight.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “No, not even to help out a beloved sister who’s going on maternity leave. I’d do everything in my power to make sure you stayed by my side . . . at work . . . and in my bed.”

  He edged up close to her, so close they stood only inches apart, and he sensed her animosity radiating off her in waves . . . and he loved it! He loved it because he knew he’d gotten to her. He’d made her uncomfortable, and he liked her uncomfortable. A raw animal sex appeal oozed from her like a burning scent. He’d not noticed such a quality in a woman since . . . well, in a long time.

  “Shall we finish the tour?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  As Jake led Sarah toward the examination rooms, a ruckus rose from the entrance to the clinic, a lot of shouting and crying out, and Jake knew instantly that the tour had just ended.

  “What’s going on?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “but whatever it is, it’s not good.”

  “Doc, Doc, Doctor Livingston,” Willie Bellefleur called out. “We’ve got a grizzly attack victim.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah exclaimed, hand to her mouth. “Oh, no.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Jake muttered under his breath. “The grizzlies have been haunting our reservation lately.”

  “Doctor Jake,” Anthony Meade called out. “We found him in a snowbank, we think he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “What’s the matter?” Rachel walked out of the women’s restroom, holding Olivia’s hand.

  “I’ve got the crash cart,” Paul yelled as he zipped past, pushing the gurney with the emergency medical supplies on it, into the emergency surgery.

  “Does this happen often?” Sarah asked in an awestruck voice, as Jake ran to help Willie and Anthony bring the injured man into the emergency surgery room.

  “Scrub up,” Jake barked at her, and the look on her face . . .

  Sorry, lady. I don’t have time to exercise good manners.

  “Does anybody know his blood type?” Paul asked, as he swung the gurney into the surgery suite and helped Jake load the injured man onto it.

  “We don’t got no idea, Doc,” Willie said. “We just found him in the snowbank, and like I said, he’d already lost a lot of blood, and he started babbling about some grizzly making lunch-meat of him.”

  Sarah shuddered with revulsion.

  Jake wondered if help had arrived too late. The man had lost a lot of blood, a nasty rip at his left pants leg looked deep, and there was an angry gash across his face from where the grizzly had swiped at him.

  “Paul,” Rachel called out through the surgery door. “I’m taking Olivia to the cabin.”

  “That’s fine, honey,” Paul called back.

  The way Jake figured it, he and Paul had this down cold.

  Jake grabbed a pair of shears and started cutting the man’s clothes off, and when he cut away the pants leg, he saw, up close, what the grizzly had done.

  The grizzly really let him have it, didn’t he?

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah said in a voice of horror. “His leg is nearly severed.”

  “Hey, Doc,” Jake snarled. “Quit talking and get to work, will ya?”

  Paul looked up and caught Jake’s eye, and Jake suspected they were both thinking the same thing.

  She isn’t going to last five minutes here.

  Chapter 5

  Oh, Sarah, you idiot! How could you be so dumb?

  In the time she’d wasted, acting like a dopey girl, instead of the fine, competent doc
tor who’d been working on the pediatric oncology wing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, she could’ve asserted herself and gotten everyone to understand that she knew what to do.

  But instead, she’d acted like an incompetent boob.

  And because of her ineptitude, she got pushed to the back of the room, as Paul and Jake worked feverishly to save the patient. Even the two locals who’d brought the man in, seemed to have a sense of purpose, for the first one grabbed a tourniquet and wrapped it around the man’s severed leg, at just above the knee, and the other man applied an antiseptic gauze to the man’s face.

  Come on, Sarah, get in there. Find out what you can do to make yourself useful, instead of standing around with your finger stuck in your mouth.

  The man’s coat had fallen to the floor and was now soaked in blood. Setting aside her queasiness—this poor man had lost a lot of blood—she grabbed the coat and began riffling through it, hoping to find a billfold.

  Luck was with her, she thought, as her fingers curled around a trifold section of leather, and as she pulled it out, she saw to her relief it’d remained intact. She snapped it open and pulled out the man’s driver’s license.

  Hm, an organ donor, that may come in handy, sooner than we think.

  She set aside her gallows humor and studied the driver’s license with more intent.

  “Reginald Burkhart,” she said aloud. “Anybody know him?”

  “Just another dumb tourist,” Willie said. “A guy who don’t got the good sense to come in from the rain. He’d walked past all the warning signs.”

  “Warning signs?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah,” the second man, named Anthony, said. “These stupid tourists like to claim they’ve found pristine hiking land, that nobody else has hiked across, but what they’re doing is putting themselves in danger, because they ignore the danger signs, warning them of the grizzlies.” He shook his head. “The idiot. Still, I hope he doesn’t die.”

  Sarah fished out a donor registration card and read it.

  “His blood type is O negative,” she said aloud.

  “Great,” Paul said. “The blood’s in the refrigerator at the back of the room, Sarah.”

  Grateful for something to do, Sarah ran to the fridge at the back of the room, flung it open, and scanned the rows of blood until she found what she was looking for. She brought it up to the gurney. She set it on the tray of instruments from which Paul was working, ran to the sink, scrubbed her hands and put on a pair of gloves, then set up the blood transfusion. She didn’t ask for permission to help tend to the patient, she simply pushed her way in, and made the mistake of bumping Jake’s shoulder.

  He looked sharply over his shoulder at her, but then, just like that, his gaze relaxed, and he grunted as she eased in beside him. He said nothing else to her.

  She applied antiseptic to the patient’s right inner arm, found a vein, inserted the needle, and started the blood transfusion as Paul stitched up a flap of skin hanging from the patient’s jaw. Paul glanced at the raw wound of the man’s leg and nodded at her from over his horn-rim eyeglasses.

  “Another pint,” she said.

  “Yes,” Paul said, and, “Did you call the medivac helicopter?”

  She goggled at him.

  Jake nodded. “All we can do at this point is stabilize him, get him ready to be flown out to the hospital in Juneau.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

  She ran back to the fridge, grabbed another pint of blood, and inserted it into the IV as the first one dripped dry.

  “The number for the medivac helicopter to Juneau is on the wall over there,” Jake said, jerking his head toward the door.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The patient may very well die, but she was already chafing under the assumption that, just because she was a woman doctor, she was also a quasi-nurse. All the tasks she was performing were functions more suited for a nurse, and, Jake Roundtree ought to be the one making the phone call, but she bit her tongue as she grabbed the landline phone on the wall and ran her index finger down the list on the wall until she came to the number for the Juneau Medical Center, and dialed it.

  She gave the person on charge the pertinent information, then hung up. “They’re on their way, they’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

  At this news, Paul groaned. “He’ll be dead in ten.”

  “Do you think we ought to ice him,” Jake asked, speaking to Paul.

  “What’s his temperature?” Paul asked, and both he and Jake looked at her.

  Okaaay, thanks, guys.

  Again, this was a nurse’s job, and Jake ought to be taking the guy’s temperature, but she also knew it wasn’t the time to play power games, and so she grabbed the thermometer, popped in a fresh plastic sleeve, and slipped it under the patient’s tongue. As she waited for the thermometer to give her a temperature, Paul finished stitching up the patient’s face and lunged for the blood pressure cuff. The temperature’s reading chilled her heart.

  “His temperature’s ninety-seven-point-two.”

  “Dammit,” Paul said, applying the cuff to the patient’s arm.

  Jake reached across the patient’s torso and helped Paul to manage the blood pressure cuff. When the systolic gauge went free, he groaned under his breath. “Fifty over thirty.”

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” Paul said.

  Sarah glanced at the blood supply. She ran to the fridge, flung open the door, and was just about to grab a third pint of blood, when a firm hand on her shoulder stopped her cold. She turned around and looked up into the pained expression on Jake’s face and she knew, before he even opened his mouth, what he was going to say.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “He’s gone.”

  As it turned out, they still needed the medivac helicopter, to transport the body to the Juneau Morgue, but there was a whole lot less urgency now that the patient had died, and so, Jake laid a white sheet over the man’s mauled face and walked over to the sinks to scrub the blood off his hands.

  Man, that was harsh. The poor girl’s only been here five minutes, and already she’s signed her first death certificate.

  Paul gave her the honor of determining the time of death—although, what an honor could it be to sign your first death certificate upon minutes of entering your residency at a hole-in-the-wall medical practice—well, he had to admit, he hadn’t thought too much of her upon first impression, but she’d handled herself well once they got into the thick of the emergency.

  Jake turned away from the sinks and winced when he saw her mopping up the floor. “Ah, Doc, you don’t gotta do that, the cleaning crew will be through here in a few minutes.”

  “It’s pretty gross,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I gotta admit, it’s pretty gross.”

  She stopped mopping and stood there, her shoulders sagging. “That was really sad.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  He longed to hug her, to put his arms around her shoulders, draw her in against his chest, and hold her close, but he didn’t.

  He just didn’t.

  When the day’s work ended, Sarah fled to the comfort and sanctuary of her cabin. She was so tired she didn’t even bother climbing the steep ladder to her loft but flung herself onto the floor and just lay there, sobbing.

  She hadn’t endured a day that bad in many years . . . not since her first year in medical school when she’d seriously considered packing it in, because she didn’t believe she was smart enough to get through it.

  After a time, even though she meant to get up and take a shower, she rolled over onto her back and, with her arms outstretched, fell asleep.

  When she awoke and lifted her head, she noted the light in the cabin had changed. It wasn’t necessarily darker, but dusky. She scrabbled to her feet, went to the tiny window, pulled back the gingham curtain and peeked out. She saw the people of the reservation walking toward the community building, attached to the clinic by a short hallway, and she realized the tribal
dinner was scheduled to start soon.

  Better get ready.

  Not that anybody’d notice her absence, she thought with a bitter smile, but she was hungry.

  She jumped into the shower, and as she reached for a nonexistent shower door to provide her privacy, she smiled ruefully, remembering her fantasy shower thoughts from the night before.

  Besides, why was she even thinking of Jake Roundtree when she had Grant McCall waiting for her back in Omaha?

  As she emerged from the shower, running her fingers through her hair, she felt better, as if the bad feelings and sorrow of the day had washed from her. She changed into a nice, black dress she’d remembered to pull from her closet just before she left home in the mistaken notion that she might want to dress up once in a great while. To this dress, she added leggings, a sweater, and a pair of Wellingtons.

  So much for dressing up.

  She bundled up into her coat and burst out of her cabin and hurried across the grounds toward the community building. As she walked, she became aware of the sensation of many pairs of eyes watching her. No doubt, they were wondering if the new doctor was any good, and she was here to assure them, she was not. She arrived at the front door, and as she reached for the door handle, the door flew open and there stood Jake in the doorway. “Come on in,” he said in a friendly voice, and as she eased past him, he looked at her and she wondered what he was thinking.

  I could’ve handed that emergency situation better than anyone this morning, and perhaps things will get better once Paul and Rachel leave the reservation.

  A presence at her side. Jake.

  “I’d love to know what you’re thinking,” he said in a husky voice.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said back smartly.

  Stung, he looked away.

  Yes, I’d better keep my distance from him.