The Boss and Nurse Albright

by Lynne Marshall

  He disengaged from her, rested his head on the couch and stared at the ceiling.

  She’d sent mixed messages all night. She’d convinced herself she’d only wanted to share a friendly dinner with him, but whenever they got together things seemed to happen. He was obviously as confused as she was.

  “Jason, we’ve got to talk about this.”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is it me?”

  “No,” he answered in a flash. “It’s me. It’s them.”

  She knew he referred to his wife and daughter. “You can’t go on punishing yourself for something you couldn’t control.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Claire.” He made a half-hearted reach for her fingers. “I’m just too messed up. Why screw you up, too?”

  “Life doesn’t come with a pain-free guarantee.”

  He glanced at her face, her breasts. “I still feel married. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been four years,” she whispered.

  As if paralyzed in the past, he didn’t respond.

  She buried her face in her hands. How could she argue with Jason’s sense of faithfulness to his deceased wife? Wasn’t that what every woman hoped for? For a man to be so devoted to her that he’d love her long after she’d died?

  It occurred to Claire that it was a cruel wish for the loved one left behind. And, being on the other side of the scenario, she couldn’t believe how wrong it felt. He’d punished himself, held back from living, and was willing to live half a life rather than risk being unfaithful to a memory. Or to feel again. Not that what they felt was love, but surely, with physical attraction such as theirs, the possibility of love could happen.

  “I’ll try to understand, but right now I feel as if you’re afraid to live,” she said, “and you’re using your deceased wife as an excuse.”

  His jaw tightened. He put his shirt back on. She remained topless on purpose. One of them needed to take a risk, and it was clear it wouldn’t be Jason. His gaze drifted to her breasts again. She saw his hunger for her, but he wouldn’t budge from his misguided martyr pedestal.

  “I guess I’m just not ready to move on yet,” he said, reaching for his jacket and heading toward the door. “I’m sorry.”

  Devastated, Claire chose not to show him out.

  Sunday morning Jason took his smaller sailboat, the sloop he’d had since college, out to sea. He hadn’t slept all night. He needed to get away. To go fast. He hoisted the mainsail and secured the halyard, then repeated the procedure with the jib. The wind was strong. He set up tight.

  The sea would take his mind away from the vision of Claire, half nude and beautiful. At least that was his plan. So far the shifting of the azure waters had only reminded him more of her…in her gauzy blue blouse…and how he’d undressed her.

  He scrubbed his face and reached for the tiller. There was no pretending. No going back. He and Claire had crossed a line. And he’d stumbled and fallen on his face.

  He prepared to jibe and ducked as the sail swung from one side of the boat to the other. He’d thought he was the luckiest man alive to meet and fall in love with Jessica, but he’d lost her. Too soon. In the four years since she’d died, he’d had sexual urges but had never acted on them. They were the biological needs he’d endured as a widower, and had never been the result of an actual living breathing woman.

  Until Claire.

  Once he’d taken off her blouse he’d wanted nothing more than to be inside her. To know all of her. The thought made him reel. He couldn’t forget Jessica. He was supposed to be with her.

  Till death do us part…

  Death had parted them. He’d lost his wife and daughter in the damn train wreck. Why couldn’t he have died with them? The tears came, as they always did, and he bit back the salty taste. How was he supposed to move on?

  The sun glared at him. He shut his eyes tight. Jessica’s face materialized and drifted farther and farther away. He tried to will her back, but her image faded, and along with the next wave she disappeared as if sea mist. Then Claire’s beaming face appeared and breezed over him like the wind.

  After his crazy behavior with Claire he’d blown any chance of being with her. What woman would put up with his unpredictability?

  The sloop had hit a dead sector and he trimmed the sails in tight, braced his feet on the deck and leaned out over the edge of the boat. He needed to change tack, head up toward the wind.

  If only life was as easy as sailing.

  Claire had survived a divorce. She would prevail over Jason’s rejection, too. The man wasn’t ready, and that was all there was to it. What made her think she was any more ready than him to get involved in a relationship? Hadn’t her plan been to be his friend, not to jump all over his bones just because he was a good kisser and looked so damn sexy?

  The man needed someone in his corner, not in his bed.

  Time was the answer. The fact that they worked together would make things awkward for a while, but she was determined to keep her job and be whatever level of friend Jason would allow her to be. Her newly awakened fantasies of being with him sexually would just have to be put on hold.

  Only one last question niggled in the back of her mind. Could she wait indefinitely?

  Sunday afternoon she took Gina to visit Mrs. Densmore in the hospital. She still had some lingering muscle spasms and sympathetic nerve hyperactivity, and was being fed high caloric nutrition through a tube in her stomach, since she had a tracheotomy in her throat. Her rigid grin had disappeared, and it gave Claire hope all of her other symptoms would recede too.

  Gina cried and didn’t understand why Mrs. Densmore couldn’t come home with them. And later, when she asked if she could see Dock-to Wah-durs and Claire said no, Gina got fussy and threw her cookie on the ground.

  Monday morning in her office, Claire lost herself in paperwork and barely noticed Jason’s footfalls in the hall. He paused at her door, freshly tanned, dressed to perfection in another perfectly tailored suit with a green shirt and complementary tie. At least his choice in clothes had brightened up.

  The sight of him raised her nipples. So much for friendship.

  “Good morning, Claire,” he said in a deep and apologetic tone. At least he hadn’t ignored her.

  So he’d decided to take the safe route and pretend nothing passionate had happened between them, that they were business associates, nothing more. Be careful what you wish for. Hadn’t she wanted to be his friend? If he needed a bland work existence, he could have it.

  She glanced up from her desk. “Morning,” she said, then went quickly went back to shuffling papers, determined not to look again until he’d left, though a trail of lost hope seemed to follow him down the hall. She wished things could be different, and gave a wry laugh, realizing that if wishes could make things different, Jason would still have a wife and child.

  Where did that leave her?

  By Thursday the civility was killing her, and she left her office door closed until after he’d arrived. She studied her scheduled appointments and noticed a patient she’d seen last week for stomach upset had been added on again today, and her symptoms had progressed to nausea, vomiting and problems with her vision. The new symptoms concerned Claire.

  Instead of waiting until the afternoon to see the patient, Claire asked Gaby to have her come in this morning. She’d squeeze her in early between the other patients. By 10:00 a.m. Mrs. MacAfee had arrived. Claire had Gaby send the patient directly to their downstairs lab for stat blood tests.

  She juggled two scheduled patients by sending one for X-rays and the other to Dr. Hanson’s nurse for a blood gas test, then rushed Mrs. MacAfee into the newly vacated exam room.

  One look at the poor woman and Claire knew she’d made the right decision.

  Claire had discovered in her survey that this patient had been taking ginseng along with digoxin and due to the risk of toxicity had asked her to stop taking it immediately. She’d followed up with bl
ood work, and fortunately the digoxin levels, though edging up to the high end, were within normal limits. Most importantly, her electrolytes had been in balance. With the new symptoms of nausea and vomiting, those lab findings could change today.

  What concerned Claire the most was the patient’s newest complaint of dimming vision.

  “Tell me everything that has happened since last week,” Claire said.

  The woman recited a litany of problems, and Claire listened carefully for any clues.

  “…and on top of that, I’ve been having such stomach problems, I think I may have ulcers,” Mrs. MacAfee said.

  “I can order a special upper endoscopy test for that, if you’d like.”

  The woman nodded enthusiastically. Claire made a note to write the referral to gastroenterology.

  “You stopped the ginseng like we discussed, right?”

  The woman nodded again, and Claire believed her. When she did her physical assessment, her blood pressure was within normal limits, though her pulse felt thready and fast.

  “May I use the bathroom?” the woman asked, looking pale as if in need to vomit.

  “Let me give you an emesis basin,” Claire said.

  “That’s not what I need to do,” the woman said.

  Claire escorted her out the door and down the hall, just beyond Jason’s office. Unfortunately, he was inside and seeing him after avoiding him all week made her stomach jump.

  “When you’re done go back to my exam room so my nurse can do an EKG.”

  Claire distracted herself by going over the patient’s results, which had just been called up from the lab. Her eyes almost bugged out when she heard the digoxin level.

  She rushed down the hall and tapped on the bathroom door. “Are you sure you stopped the ginseng, Mrs. MacAfee?” Nothing. Not a sound. “Mrs. MacAfee?” Claire jiggled the door handle and called her name out several more times.

  Her nurse rushed over. “The skeleton key is on the door ledge,” she said.

  Claire felt around and found it, and opened the door to find Mrs. MacAfee passed out on the bathroom floor.

  “Call a code assist,” Claire said, checking the patient’s carotid pulse. The woman was breathing and her pulse was present, though still thready. “I think she’s dehydrated. Let’s start an IV. But first let’s get her on the gurney.”

  Jason appeared in the hall, pushing the emergency gurney toward them. “Let me help,” he said.

  “She’s dig toxic and now she’s passed out,” Claire said, taking the woman’s feet while Jason lifted under the patient’s arms and hoisted her onto the gurney.

  The next several minutes were a blur as they worked to start an IV and set up the EKG monitor. Mrs. MacAfee was slipping in and out of ventricular tachycardia. She needed to be in the E.R. stat.

  “Call for an ambulance,” Claire said to the nurse. Mrs. MacAfee’s eyes fluttered; she fought to keep them open.

  “Let’s get some lidocaine on board,” Jason said immediately after Claire placed the intravenous line.

  As Claire opened the emergency cart, she added everything up in her head. The patient had all of the cardinal signs of digoxin toxicity: nausea, vomiting, anorexia, amblyopia. She’d need to be admitted to a monitored unit and receive antidigoxin antibody fragments, and to get her electrolytes back in balance. Claire shuddered, thinking about what might have happened if she hadn’t brought the patient in this morning instead of waiting to see her in the afternoon.

  But if Mrs. MacAfee had stopped the ginseng, what had made her digoxin levels continue to rise?

  Jason stayed by Claire and the patient as the lidocaine drip helped stabilize the intermittent ventricular tachycardia on the monitor screen, and Mrs. MacAfee drifted in and out of consciousness. His presence brought her an added degree of confidence.

  Once the ambulance arrived and the patient was safely on her way to the hospital, Claire took a deep breath and noticed Jason had put his hand on her shoulder. Instead of bringing comfort, the gesture made her tense up even more. She needed to get away from him, and made the excuse of calling the woman’s husband.

  An hour and a half later, eye to eye with Mr. MacAfee in the E.R. waiting room, Claire was grateful to deliver good news. His wife was responding to the treatment, and would be admitted to a monitor bed in the ICU. Once she’d calmed him down, she asked several of the questions floating through her mind.

  “How long has she been complaining about stomach pain?”

  “Two or three weeks,” he said. “She’d started taking this special tea to help.”

  “Special tea?”

  “A long time ago, a lady at the health food store told her that licorice tea was supposed to be good for stomach problems.”

  Off the top of her head, Claire had a vague memory about licorice being very helpful with soothing stomach pain and even treating ulcers, but why would the woman keep drinking it when she was getting progressively sicker? Buried in the myriad herbal treatments in her mind, a side-effect jumped out at Claire. Patients who used licorice and who were on digoxin were at risk for toxicity. No sooner had she weaned Mrs. MacAfee off one potentially dangerous drug/herb interaction with digoxin and ginseng, than the woman had replaced it with another—licorice.

  After she informed the attending doctor at the hospital about the tea, and knowing Mrs. MacAfee was in good hands, she went back to the clinic. Bedraggled and stressed out, she nibbled at lunch at her desk, and took some extra red yam powder along with some anti-inflammatories to offset the ache she felt growing between her shoulders.

  She heard a tapping at her door. It was Jason. Too tired to fight her feelings for him, she picked at her food and told him about discovering the licorice tea their patient had been taking unbeknownst to them.

  “You can’t know everything, Claire. You’ll drive yourself nuts if you try,” he said.

  “Mrs. MacAfee jumped right out of the frying pan and straight into the fire, and all she wanted to do was help herself feel better.” Claire dug fingers into her hair and stared at her desk. “I don’t think the survey was extensive enough. How do we get through to these people to check with us before adding any new herb to their regimen?”

  “You said it was tea,” he said, sounding far too level-headed. “How many people are going to think of tea as medicine? People on high blood pressure meds take over the counter cold medicine all the time, then they wonder why their blood pressure is sky-high afterwards. It’s just human nature to try to take things into our own hands and fix it without bothering anyone else.”

  He looked far too sympathetic with his soft gray eyes as he walked around her desk, and sat on the edge. She tensed and sat back farther in her chair. If he touched her again, she might not have the strength to fend him off. And if he wasn’t capable of reaching out emotionally, then she didn’t want to start something that was bound to end badly. She’d be his friend and associate. That was her mantra and she was sticking to it.

  “You can’t catch everything, and you’ll never be able to stop people from hurting themselves,” he said softly.

  How ironic the statement coming from Jason’s beautifully formed lips, and she was on the verge of calling him out on it.

  Someone tapped on the door. “Claire?” Her nurse. “Our first afternoon patient is here.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JASON unlocked his condo door. After the accident, he’d moved here from the luxurious family home set high on the hillside above Santa Barbara. He couldn’t bear to live in the place filled with memories in every room. He’d been in shock at the time and could hardly function. Jon, Phil, and René had arranged everything: Found the condo; listed his house for sale; packed and moved him. In a daze, he’d followed along.

  Even the spacious two-bedroom ocean-view condo felt too big for him to rattle around in. He’d lived here, if you could call it that, for the last three and a half years.

  He tossed his jacket over the back of a chair, eased off his loafers, and padded
across the hacienda-styled tiles to the kitchen. He poured some of the coffee left from the morning and warmed it in the microwave. As a bachelor, he could do that, not giving a damn how bitter it tasted. Heading straight to the terrace, he opened the French windows and sat at the glass and wrought iron table to sort through the mail he’d brought in.

  His eyes were drawn to the coast and out to sea, the only constant thing in his life. How many times had he considered sailing off and never coming back?

  Lately, the thought had less appeal. Since meeting Claire.

  As it often did, his mind drifted to Claire. She’d been willing to give herself to him. The thought of her, topless and vulnerable, waiting for his touch, made him crinkle then wad up an advertising flyer.

  I’m not ready to move on, he remembered telling her. And if by chance he were ready to get involved with her, was he ready to take the risk? Rationally, he knew Lupus wasn’t deadly, that people lived with the autoimmune disease for years and years. But it affected the quality of life and, if not controlled, it could shorten hers. If he allowed himself to care for her, could he survive losing her? If a flare-up attacked an organ like her kidneys, she’d have to go to extreme treatment like chemotherapy to ward it off—a risky process. Was he ready for any possibility if he allowed himself to become involved with her?

  Instead of only thinking of himself, he should consider her feelings. Was he a better man than her ex-husband?

  He palmed his eye sockets and rubbed vigorously.

  Would he look back at fifty and wonder why he’d squandered a chance at something real with a living breathing woman, when all he had left of Jessica was faded memories?

  Opening up to Claire would be hard enough, but being around Gina made him ache so much for Hanna he could barely keep from tearing up at times. He remembered the wondrous look in his daughter’s eyes whenever he’d taken her to the zoo, and he’d seen the exact same look on Gina’s face the other day. His heart had twisted and cramped the entire afternoon Saturday.