Santiago's Convenient Fiancée

by Annie O'Neil

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets as she continued peeling off the jumpsuit, revealing her petite body bit by bit, curve by swoop... Por Dios!

  “Murph.” He scanned the parking lot for a concession stand. “I’m going to get some water before we go to brunch. Want anything?”

  “Hang on a minute, my beeper’s going off.” She threw him her backpack. “The work one. Can you check it?”

  He tugged the pager off the black strap and looked.

  He felt his own pager sending vibrations along the length of his belt. No guesses what the message was. He looked anyway and grimaced. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Saddle up, Murph. There’s been a big one.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure we packed everything?” Saoirse threw Santi an anxious look.

  “It’s the Keys, Murph, not the moon.”

  He gave her leg a reassuring pat. From the sounds of the traffic reports coming in like bullet fire on their radio, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Two dueling Jet-Skiers had been swerving in and out of coastal fog patches. One of the Jet Skis had exploded underneath the driver just as they’d approached a causeway. The blast had sent him flying onto the windshield of a car that had veered into oncoming weekend traffic. Thirty...maybe forty vehicles involved. Including an oil truck. Two fatalities had already been called in.

  Saoirse had actually looked grateful when Santi had insisted on driving after her time out on the track. It took a lot of concentration to come out on top. Energy she hadn’t banked on saving for what could easily be a twenty-four-hour shift.

  “I threw in a few extra of everything. There’s always a supplies truck to follow up, as well. They’ll call in county, the fire departments, everyone.” He tried to dismiss the grim expression taking hold of his features. No point in giving her the jitters before they even got there. “The triage areas might already be set up by the time we get out there.” He flicked the sirens off and on again to give a particularly pointed signal to the oblivious car in front of them.

  “I suppose this sort of thing is your area of expertise,” Saoirse said after a few minutes of silent weaving in and out of traffic. Sirens were sounding from all sectors of the city and cars were pulling to the side of the road well in advance, as if a statewide alert had been sounded. Doubtless the news was all over the radio.

  “Accidents are just that.” He pressed his lips together, hands gripping the wheel so tightly the veins strained against his skin. He’d done several tours in the military and each one had chipped away at his ability to stay neutral.

  War was ugly. Ugly because it was intentional. Accidents? No one meant for them to happen. Throwing a grenade or setting off a shoulder-launched missile? There was nothing mistaken about that. And the lives lost? Just as pointless as the teenaged boys proving themselves to get into a gang by killing his parents.

  A cruel waste. It was the spur that had finally pushed him to come home. Not that he’d made any headway in extending an olive branch to his brothers. War, it seemed, came more easily to him than asking forgiveness.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine, querida.” He shot her a quick glance and gave her leg a quick pat. She was unwittingly becoming better and better at noticing when his thoughts drifted in the direction of his brothers. “Just getting in the right mind-set. And remember, we’re a team. I’ve got your back.”

  She nodded silently, eyes glued to the road ahead of them.

  “You’ve not been involved in an MCI before?”

  “A Mass Casualty Incident? No.”

  “There are a lot of acronyms on days like this. You remember the START model, right? Things are a bit different in the military—but there’s a lot of overlap. Okay—START.” Santi kept his voice steady. He was used to being cool in dangerous situations. The more intense the fighting, the calmer he’d become. Maybe that was why the happier he felt with Saoirse, the more agitated he was feeling.

  “START,” Saoirse repeated, as if reading from a textbook. “Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment.” She held up four fingers, bending them down as she went through each group. “The expectant. In other words, those who are likely to die. The injured who can be helped by immediate transportation. The injured whose transport can wait and people with minor injuries.”

  “See! You’ve got it. Priorities for evacuation and transport?”

  “Deceased remain where they fall. Black tags—those expected to die within ten minutes or less are given palliative care to reduce suffering, but are likely to die of their injuries.” Her voice became more clinical as she continued. He understood. It was vital to separate emotions from actions at times like these. She sucked in a breath and continued. “Immediate evacuation for the red tags—medevac if possible. Do you think they’ll come? The helicopters?” She turned in her seat to face him.

  “Absolutely. They’re probably en route already. Keep going,” he said, encouraged to hear her voice becoming calmer the more she reminded herself how much she did know.

  “Ah, delayed or yellow tags can have delayed evacuation—that is, they can’t go until everyone who has critical injuries has been transported.”

  “And the green tags?”

  “Last in line, but need constant checking in case their condition changes and they require retriaging.” She sat back with a triumphant smile, which immediately dropped from her face as the accident scene came into view.

  Santi’s low whistle reflected what she felt. Impressive was the wrong word to describe what they saw. Overwhelming was coming close.

  The fog that had enshrouded the causeway was clearing to reveal something more akin to a horror scene. Passengers and drivers were staggering out of vehicles. A fuel truck was jackknifed across three lanes of traffic, flames reaching higher with each passing moment. A couple of fire trucks and a rescue team were already on-site, doing their best to clear people as far away from the fuel truck as possible, columns of black smoke scalding the sky above them. The scream and roar of their equipment releasing trapped passengers from their vehicles was all but drowning out the cries for help.

  Santi pulled their ambulance onto the edge of the causeway at the direction of a stressed-looking sheriff.

  “Where do you want us?”

  “Check with the Fire Rescue Squad. They were here first and know their way around an MCI better than anyone.”

  Santi and Saoirse each shouldered medical run bags, putting as many supplies as they could on their wheeled gurney, and ran into the depths of the scene.

  “Over here! We need someone on the red tags until the medevac arrives!” A paramedic from the fire crew directed them to a huge red sheet where four people were laid out and another was on approach. “Can you start here? Compound tib-fib, arterial bleed. I’m afraid you’ll have to do the rest.” And he ran off into the choking fug of smoke and flames.

  Santi dropped to his knees next to the unconscious patient, signaling to Saoirse to do the same on the other side. She pulled out her flashlight and checked the man’s pupils for dilation. Her wrist flicked first to one eye, then the next.

  “Responsive.”

  “Good,” Santi muttered, his gloved fingers seeking and immediately stemming the arterial bleed in the man’s leg.

  The compound fracture was so crudely exposed to the elements Saoirse nearly retched at the sight.

  “Check airways, circulation.” Santi’s voice was steady. Reassuring. Exactly what she needed.

  This was precisely what her paramedic training had prepared her for. The car racing. Moving to Miami in the first place without knowing a soul. A complete reinvention in order to handle every painful curveball life threw at her.

  She looked into Santi’s eyes and felt fortified by the understanding they held, as if his strength was flowing directly into her.
They would get through this. Together.

  “We can do this one of two ways.” He reached across to his run bag and grabbed a clamp for the arterial bleed. “Can you get a drip going on this guy with some morphine in the bag?” Her hands flew into automatic pilot, working quickly, efficiently as she focused on what he was saying. “We can work through the patients together, like the A-team we are, or you can peel off on your own and call me if you need a hand.”

  Saoirse looked up for a millisecond to gather her thoughts. Her eyes didn’t even have a chance to reach the heavens before the decision was made for her. “Sir! Stay where you are!” Seconds became nanoseconds as she swiftly checked she’d secured the saline drip for Santi’s patient. “You good here?” She received a curt nod and was up and guiding a man with a massive head wound to the large tarp for severe traumas, all the while taking in just how bad the situation unfolding around them was.

  Time took on an otherworldly quality.

  Head wounds were downgraded; blood flow always made them look worse than they were. A perforated lung was stabilized as best she could before a helicopter crew whisked the teenaged girl away. On Santi’s count, they stabilized then shifted a screaming middle-aged woman who’d seen her daughter being loaded onto the helicopter, the screams increasing as the extent of her pelvic injuries became clearer.

  Saoirse saw herself as if from above, a whirling blur of activity matching medical supplies to patients. Neck braces. Splints. Sterile bandages. Change after change of gloves. Her stethoscope pressing to chest after chest. The sudden realization her own knees were bleeding after kneeling in glass while giving lifesaving compressions to a little boy. Heartbeat. None. Clear!

  She watched as her fingers unwrapped hydrocolloidal dressing for a twenty-something woman who’d just been pulled out of a burning vehicle, inserting a saline drip, doing her best to stop the woman from going into shock as she cooled then dressed her burns, all the time murmuring soothing confirmations that she would get to a hospital. She would survive this.

  A shift in the wind abruptly changed the tenor of the entire operation.

  Flames, licking at the sky above them, abruptly veered toward the triage section, bringing the thick black smoke along with it and all but threatening to devour everything in its path. Sight, sound and especially smell were overwhelmed with the terrifying change of events.

  She froze completely—the heat of the fire seemed to be sucking the very oxygen out of the air around her. Out of her peripheral vision Saoirse saw firefighters unleash streams of foam into the inferno, to little effect. Instinct took over. The need to survive and to help her patient took precedence.

  She threw herself over her patient in an arc, only just managing to slip a space blanket between them, ironically staving off the hypothermia the burned woman might be prone to.

  As she heard and felt the elements around them being fought with the incredible bravery of the fire crews, Saoirse was rocked by a revelation, then another and another. Each hit of understanding striking her in all-encompassing body blows.

  With the kind of clarity one has after a weather front thunders down abruptly then shifts and clears, she saw her life for what it was. A massive move forward.

  Her need to change her life had come not from heartbreak, as she’d thought, but from a deeper place. Something that had craved change. Her very essence had fought to become the woman she was now. And for the first time in her life she liked what she thought she had come to embody.

  A brave, slightly lippy, kind soul. She dared to open her eyes, urgently needing to see Santi. He had helped her reach this place, to gain the newfound confidence she couldn’t have ever imagined having just nine short months ago.

  Still hunched over her patient, she squinted against the soot and smoke of the accident scene. The winds had shifted again and the firefighters were mastering the blaze now. But her eyes still sought and at long last gained purchase on the only visual salve she needed... Santiago Valentino.

  * * *

  Santi’s eyes met Saoirse’s and the interchange of relief and untethered emotion was all but palpable. He ached to pull her into his arms, wipe the soot from her face, take her away from all of this and assure her she would always be safe as long as he lived. But there was more work to do.

  He’d just begun securing a patient to a backboard when the flames threatened and he needed to act as swiftly as possible. This was one of those moments when he was grateful for his time in the military. Of course, external factors mattered, but it was amazing what a man could block out when someone’s survival was utterly dependent on you. Warfare, at its worst, made this mass casualty pale in comparison. But each life was every bit as precious.

  He jacked up his treatment on the man lying in front of him. He’d seen this type of injury too many times. Traumatic brain injury. Pupils—nonresponsive. He did as quick a gauge on the Glasgow Coma Scale as he could but there were too many factors yet to be explored to be precise.

  “What do you need?” Saoirse appeared by his side.

  “The whole nine yards,” Santi replied grimly. “Looks like this poor guy was ejected through his windshield. Significant brain trauma. Pupils are nonresponsive.” He held his fingers in front of the man’s mouth. “Breathing is compromised.”

  “Shall I intubate?”

  “Sooner rather than later. We don’t want him having to fight hypoxia as well.”

  Saoirse deftly inserted the intubation kit and together they got a flow of oxygen running. Recovery would be long and hard for this man, if not impossible. But Santi was going to give him every shot he could to fight the odds.

  Together they scored the man’s physiological parameters and gauged his systolic blood pressure.

  “He’s going to need a good neurosurgeon,” Saoirse said.

  Santi nodded. He hoped, for this man’s sake, he could afford the elite clinic where his brother Dante worked as a neurosurgeon. This guy would need the best and Dante did nothing by halves. “Go on.” He pointed Saoirse in the direction of another patient being transferred to the critical section. There weren’t enough hands on deck for buddying up.

  “I need a helicopter now!”

  It was impossible to know if his words had reached the right ears. So he repeated it, again and again, until he was hoarse and a flying doctor’s flight suit appeared in his eye line.

  Time to move to the next patient.

  More paramedics arrived. Doctors stuck in the traffic jam raced to offer assistance, tugging on neoprene gloves as they ran. Injury after injury presented itself. Each time Santiago began to wonder if his body could handle lifting another backboarded patient onto a gurney, a chopper basket, or just lending an arm of support as he steered a patient through the crowd to a loved one...his eyes sought Saoirse’s. The clear blue of her gaze was exactly the life-affirming medicine he needed. Her energy never seemed to abate. Her focus was intense, her manner calm, exacting. Precisely the type of woman anyone would want to have come to their rescue if they were lucky enough to be visited by an angel.

  He shook his head and gave it a rough scrub with the tips of his fingers. His feelings for Saoirse were launching out of his heart at rocket speed. He’d never understood the lure of settling down until now. Not that he imagined a life with her would be akin to hanging up his hat in the adventure department. Far from it. Life with Saoirse would be—

  “Santiago?”

  He saw the man approach, knew he’d said his name, but couldn’t make the connection. Not at first.

  And then it hit him. Harder than he could have imagined.

  Detective Guillermo Alvarez. The first person on the scene after his parents had been shot and ultimately killed. The one man who had promised to find the pendejos who’d turned a robbery into a double homicide, nearly taking his kid brother in the process.

  This man’s a
ppearance was just about the one thing that could shake his focus.

  Well...his brothers could’ve walked out of the crowd. That would’ve done the trick, too, but...

  “Santiago. I thought that was you. Long time no see. Acere, que bola?”

  “Estoy pinchando.” He stuck out his hand, which was met for a sound shake, all the time refusing to concede that seeing the fifty-something detective was rattling him to his very core.

  “You signed up, didn’t you?” The detective looked up to the sky as if a plane were going to fly by with the answer.

  “Marines.” Santi saved him the time.

  “Sí, correcto.” The detective nodded along. “Your brother—I think it was Alejandro who told me.”

  Santi kept his gaze level. How could he tell this man he hadn’t seen his own brother since he’d been back, weighed down by over a decade of guilt and unfulfilled responsibility?

  “Man, is he ever doing well. A pediatric transplant surgeon! Who would’ve thought it, eh? After all he’d been through? Working in a hospital would’ve been the last thing I would’ve wanted after going through what he had...” The detective’s voice petered out, but Santi could have easily filled in the rest. The chain of events following the shootings were as alive in his mind as if they’d happened yesterday.

  Santi scrubbed a hand over his face, hoping it came across as a gesture of pride rather than regret. What had happened to his brother—the shooting, the organ-transplant surgery, the ensuing surgeries—those hadn’t been his fault. Leaving Alejandro to navigate his teens on his own had.

  “He always was amazing.” That much was true. Nothing would change that about his brother. All of them were a league above the rest. Him anyway.

  “Santiago!”

  Saoirse’s voice cut through the rage of memories. “We need to load up and roll with this one!”

  A smile teased at the corners of his lips. Would he ever get tired of hearing Saoirse’s Irish lilt play with American slang?

  Probably not, but this is a two-year deal, bro. Man up.