I jerked my eyes away and saw that wolfish grin again. He turned side-on to me as he dried his ass, his hard cheeks dimpled. I couldn’t stop thinking about my fantasy, how my fingers had dug into those cheeks, my thumbs right in those dimples….
He lazily pulled on a pair of jockey shorts and then swaggered towards me, a stripper teasing the shy girl at a bachelorette party. I think he was expecting me to blush and hurry away, and that would have been the end of it.
But something happened.
With each step he took, I could see his eyes changing, the heat rising in him. And the look he gave me rooted me to the spot: I couldn’t run. The mood began to shift. Three steps from me and it had become only partly a game. Two steps. One step. And suddenly, it wasn’t a game at all.
It was happening again, just like it had in the cafeteria, in the bar. My breathing had gone fast and tight. I felt like I was falling and my pulse was hammering in my ears. The heat of his near-naked body throbbed through the narrow sliver of air between us and melted me.
His eyes were flicking over my face, eating me up, but his jaw was set, lips pressed together. He was battling with himself and the tension was building with each heartbeat. He almost glared, furious at me for doing this to him. Me?! I looked down at myself. And when I looked up….
When I looked up, the anger and the indecision were gone. He slipped a hand around the back of my head. Oh my God! We can’t— But I didn’t pull away.
He leaned down—
Krista burst through the door. “Two criticals coming—” She stumbled to a stop as she saw us. “...in. We need you.”
Corrigan and I stared at each other, dumbstruck. We were about to—We nearly—
Shouts from outside. The rattle of gurneys. We both nodded to each other, dropping our eyes. Later. He pulled on a fresh set of scrubs and we ran for the ER.
20
Dominic
“WHAT HAVE we got?” I yelled.
Beside me, I saw Beckett’s eyes widen in disbelief. In the few minutes we’d been away, the ER had gone from quiet to total chaos. The main doors were open, letting in a freezing current of air. A crowd of guys had just entered with two injured men carried on their shoulders. There were long furrows in the snow outside where they’d forced their way through, the white polka-dotted with red. This looks bad.
Taylor got to the first guy as his buddies dumped him onto a gurney. “Head injury,” she called, bending over him. “A lot of bleeding. Pupils fixed and dilated”
I raced over. The guy was big, with a bald head and a black beard dusted with snow. We’d have to work fast, he might be bleeding into his brain. “How’s the other one?” I called over my shoulder.
The men dumped the second guy onto a gurney. Beckett ran forward to examine him—
“STOP!” I didn’t wait around to see if she’d heard, just grabbed her shoulders and wrenched her backwards. Her feet slid from under her and she would have gone down if I hadn’t kept hold of her. “Look,” I said, panting.
The second guy had razor wire tangled around his left leg and a coil of it had spilled off the gurney and was trailing across the floor. She’d almost run right into it.
“Fucking evil stuff,” I warned her. “It’ll cut you right down to the bone and it likes to spring out at you. We need to cut it off him.”
Beckett grabbed a nurse. “Find Maggie! Tell her to bring some wire cutters!”
The nurse ran off. I stepped closer to the patient and saw the blood soaking his pants and dripping to the floor. We couldn’t wait: we had to start working on him now, or he’d bleed out.
Taylor and Krista had hooked monitors up to the head injury guy. “This guy’s not looking good!”
They didn’t need to read out the numbers, I could hear the beeps of his faltering heartbeat. Shit! We’d have to work on both of them at once. I made a decision and turned to Beckett. “You’re going to have to run one of these.”
I saw her freeze. “What?!” She looked around her, going white. “I never—”
It hit home, then. She’s never run a trauma. The closest she’d been to the ER was a six month rotation as an intern. I knew that just being in the middle of all this chaos freaked her out, and I was expecting her to give orders. But we had no choice. I grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “I’ll be right here,” I told her.
We stared at each other and for a second I was lost in those eyes. I would have kissed her. If Krista hadn’t come in right then, I would have—
Later. “You can do this,” I told her.
She took a panicked breath...and nodded. My heart soared. Attagirl! I pushed her towards the head injury guy. I didn’t want her anywhere near the razor wire.
I got the gurneys moved around so that both patients were next to each other and I could talk to her as we worked. Beckett shoved her arms into an ER apron and pulled on some gloves. Her hands were shaking.
I cut away the guy’s pants and what I saw made me wince. The wire had coiled and tightened around his leg: the more he’d struggled, the more it had dug in, slicing into him like a band saw. It was almost down to the bone in places. Lucky for him, he was out cold. “How’s yours looking?” I called.
No response. I glanced across. Beckett was facing away from me, but I could see the tension in her back. Everyone was looking at her expectantly and she’d frozen, unsure where to start. I turned back to my patient and started trying to stem the bleeding while I talked. “What’s his pulse ox?”
“Um…85,” she said, her voice high and tight.
“Okay. You’re going to need to intubate him.” It wasn’t hard to make my voice soothing. I really felt for her. I remembered how terrifying it had been when I’d run my first trauma and I’d had two years of ER internship by that point. “You ever do that?”
“Once. I mean... I watched a Resident do it.” She paused and I imagined her biting her lip. “Four years ago.”
“You can do it. Head back, visualize the cords…” I talked her through it, step by step. Credit to her, she didn’t miss a beat. Meanwhile, I was trying to put pressure on all the places my guy was bleeding from, but I’d run out of hands. I called Taylor over to help. “Don’t get cut!” I warned her as I showed her where to press.
“I’m in!” Beckett called triumphantly.
I relaxed a little as I heard a nurse start to pump the intubation bag and fill the man’s lungs. “You’re doing great!” I called. By now, I had my hands, Taylor’s hands and a nurse’s hands all pressing on the guy’s leg to stop the bleeding. It was working, but it was dangerous as hell. Taylor was actually having to pass her arms through a couple of the razor-sharp coils of wire to reach him. Where the hell is Maggie with those wire cutters?
My eyes flicked to the guy’s arm: the nurses had rolled up his sleeve to attach a blood pressure monitor and I could see a couple of tattoos: one that was definitely from prison and a weird one that caught my eye. Two crossed rifles beneath a clenched fist. I’d seen that one before.
Fuck.
I looked up at the crowd of men milling around. And this time I spotted them: Colt and his son Seth.
My heart started to pound. “Call Earl, get him over here.” I’d thought we were rid of Colt. Now we had his whole gang in our ER. Razor wire...at a guess, they’d been breaking into somewhere when these guys got injured.
Just seeing that bastard again made me automatically twist around and check that Beckett was okay: that deep, protective urge again. But it was the wrong thing to do because she looked up and saw my expression, then turned and saw Colt herself. I watched as she went pale. Shit. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about. Taylor noticed, too, and caught Seth’s eye. She looked down at the injured men, then back to him: what are you mixed up in? And he just glanced at his dad and gave a tiny shake of his head, apologetic or can’t talk or both.
Part of me wanted to throw the whole gang out of the hospital. But both guys would die if we didn’t treat them. We’d just have to do our
jobs and hope Colt didn’t turn violent.
At that moment, Beckett’s patient crashed.
I heard it first as a collective intake of breath from the nurses and then the steady tone of the heart monitor. “Talk to me, Beckett!”
Her voice was strained. “His heart’s stopped! I—get the…” Everyone was talking at once and I lost her voice under the hubbub. So did the nurses: I could hear them muttering in confusion. ”You’ve got to speak up, Beckett!” I called. “People have to hear you!”
I could hear her struggling to make that small voice big. Then it broke free, shaky but clear. “Defibrillator paddles! And 1mg of Epi!”
There was a bustle of activity. I heard Beckett cursing, praying, then the whine of the defibrillator and the thump as it discharged. And then, at last, the steady beep of a healthy rhythm. She’d done it. I craned around and just managed to catch her eye. She was white-faced but she gave me a quick nod of thanks.
Maggie ran up with a pair of wire cutters. At last! I had to nod to her where to cut because I didn’t have a hand to spare. In a few minutes, we’d have cut this godawful stuff off him and then—
He woke up.
It was the one thing none of us had been expecting. He’d been out cold since he was brought in and it hadn’t occurred to us that he’d come round. But as Maggie tried to nudge a loop of wire out of his leg, it scraped a nerve and suddenly he was screaming, half-sitting up. Everything twisted and moved. Maggie’s wire cutters snipped. The wire, suddenly free, uncoiled with a metal shriek. We all jumped back from the gurney. But Taylor, whose hands were within the loops of the wire, had to move slower to avoid slashing her wrists. The end of the wire sprang towards her face.
I shoved her aside. And felt it slash into the side of my neck. Fuck!
For a few seconds, everyone just stood there, shell-shocked. Then I started giving orders. We gave the patient something for the pain. Then we held him down while Maggie carefully cut the wire away from his leg. Wearing heavy gloves, she finally managed to get the whole bloody coil of it off him and well away from where we were working.
Taylor rushed over to me and started examining my neck. I tried to wave her away, but she shook her head. I glanced down at my scrubs: I was dripping blood. Oh. I held still.
“It’s deep and messy,” she said, her voice tight. “But it missed your jugular.”
“How much by?”
“You don’t want to know.”” She paused and stared up at me. “Thank you,” she said at last. She was still breathing a little fast, still imagining how the wire would have slashed across her eyes, her cheeks. “It should have been—”
I put my hands gently on her shoulders. “A scar looks better on a guy,” I told her firmly.
Our eyes met and she calmed a little. We nodded to each other. We had each other’s backs.
“It’s going to need stitches,” she told me, taping a pad of gauze over it.
“Him first,” I said, nodding towards the guy we were working on.
With the wire out of the way, we managed to stem the bleeding and his pressure slowly recovered. We sutured the wounds and dressed them, then swaddled his leg in bandages. He’d be off his feet for a while, but he should make a full recovery.
I went over to check on Beckett. She’d got the head injury guy breathing on his own, but he was still unconscious. Just as I arrived, she finished giving orders for his medication and the nurses wheeled him off to the intensive care area. I watched Beckett slowly surface from the headlong adrenaline rush she’d been in. She blinked at the ER as if she’d forgotten where she was.
And then she just ran. She bolted across the room, dodged around a startled Taylor and disappeared into the locker room.
And I ran right after her.
21
Amy
I RAN OVER to the sinks and stood there gripping the porcelain. I was physically shaking, skin clammy with cold sweat. I ducked low, unsure if I was going to throw up, and sucked in air in shuddering gulps.
When I glanced up at the mirror again, Corrigan was standing behind me.
I shook my head at him in the mirror. “I can’t do this.” My voice was a pleading rasp.
He moved closer, but I didn’t turn around. “What are you talking about? You did great.”
“I froze! That guy nearly died!”
“But he didn’t. You saved him.”
Didn’t he get it? I wasn’t like him! “I was terrified!”
He moved even closer. Now I could feel the presence of him behind me, his heat against my back. “You were scared but you did it anyway. Definition of bravery.”
I started shaking my head. Strong hands on my shoulders twisted me around and then he was there, not just in the mirror, but real, looming and warm and solid right in front of me, seeing me at my most vulnerable. “I just wanted to stay up there!” I blurted. “Where it’s quiet and safe and not….”
“Chaos?” he murmured.
I nodded.
He placed his hand on my damp cheek and I marvelled at how big those palms were. He looked so rooted, so right, here, a colossus carved from granite to especially fit the ER, with his strength and his confidence and his big, booming voice. And I was just a dormouse, trying to scurry back upstairs.
I knew he was going to try to convince me. My mind was racing non-stop, a billion reasons and arguments I could throw at him. But he sidestepped it all because he didn’t use words. He just gazed steadily down at me and what I saw in his eyes short-circuited my panic.
He believed I did belong down here. He believed enough for the both of us.
My chest filled, buoying me up above the fear. And as I calmed, I realized how quiet it was. We were alone in the locker room... again. I swallowed. I saw his chest fill as he too remembered the nearly-kiss. It was happening again, that thrumming, breathless whirl that pushed all other thoughts from my head. His eyes fell to my lips. His hand gripped my cheek….
He leaned into me and I tilted my head way back so that I could meet his eyes.
“I can’t resist you,” he said. Four little shockwaves of silver-edged air that reverberated into my brain and set off a nuclear explosion as their meaning sunk in. Frenzied disbelief and arguments and what if?s all swept away by an expanding blast wave of hot emotion. I had to say something, but I couldn’t form words. So I just put my hand on top of the hand that gripped my cheek... and pressed it there.
“You’re more than anyone here gives you credit for,” he said. “You hide away but you shouldn’t hide.” Each word was low and heavy, big ingots of silver that sunk into my soul. The cocky, teasing tone was gone. His voice came from somewhere down deep.
His hand moved from my cheek, sliding up over my temple, his fingers pushing under my surgical cap and smoothing over my pinned-back hair. I felt the cap tumble to the floor. “You drive me... fucking…. crazy,” he told me. With each word, his voice grew tighter and my breathing grew faster. For the first time, there wasn’t any of my usual me?! His voice didn’t allow any argument.
His thumb stroked my hair, following its lines, and I felt the tiny tremble in his hand. God, his whole body had gone taut, quaking with the effort of holding back. “There’s a sink behind you,” he said. “Do you know what I want to do?” His other hand was suddenly on my waist, warm through the thin fabric. “I want to shove these down your legs,”—the edge of his hand nudged the waistband of my scrub pants—“and pick you up, sit you on the edge and just fuck you right here.” He leaned in even closer, his lips right at my ear, and his voice became a growl wrapped around a core of molten silver. “I want all of you. I want your tits and your legs and your arse and your sweet, shy—”
He didn’t say the last word. He breathed it. In his accent, it was transformed, those four letters turned from something ugly and course into something reverent but just as hotly forbidden. It soaked straight to my core and became a thrashing, urgent heat, an ache between my thighs. I wanted him. I wanted him more than I’ve ever w
anted anything. My breath came in halting, frantic pants. I was delirious for this man.
“But…” His face twisted with the effort of saying it. I felt the muscles in his arms straining. “I...can’t....do that. You deserve better than a quick fuck, Beckett.” My surname wasn’t formal, anymore. It was a pet name, a codename more intimate than Amy could ever be. “You deserve the fairy tale.”
I blinked up at him. He sunk his fingertips into my hair for a second and then started to withdraw that hand and it felt like a knife being drawn from me. I clamped my own hand on top of it, holding it on me. I just couldn’t bear to let this go. “Then—Then don’t make it a quick—Do...do more! I—” I struggled to put it into words: an invisible ocean current that was barreling me towards him, unstoppable. “I really like you!” I said at last, and cursed myself because that didn’t even begin to describe it.
But it didn’t matter because immediately, I saw it in his eyes: he felt it, too. “We could...be together,” I said. Dating. A relationship. Something. I didn’t care. I just couldn’t go back to being alone. Everything that had seemed so perfect, before he came along, so safe and warm, suddenly seemed so dark and cold.
Both of his hands found my cheeks, now. His thumbs slowly rubbed over my cheekbones as if he was memorizing them, making the most of what would be our very last contact. “No, Beckett. We couldn’t. I can’t give you that.”
I just stared up at him, shell-shocked by what I heard in his voice. He was trapped, wrapped in chains and weighted to the ocean bed. He couldn’t surface, however much he wanted to. And he didn’t want me to have just the fake him, all arrogance and swagger, the him he showed everyone else.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I nodded. Felt hot tears weighing my eyes and blinked furiously. “Your neck’s going to need stitches,” I told him. “Come on. I’ll do it.”
He gazed at me for a beat, those beautiful eyes full of pain at hurting me. But then he nodded. He understood. If this was it, forever, then I needed to get straight back to working with him, to prove to myself I could. He led the way out of the locker room and I grabbed my surgical cap and followed, silently wiping my eyes on my sleeve.
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