by Radclyffe
“I talked them into booking a flight back tomorrow morning.”
“How did you work that?”
Beau hesitated. “I told them you’d be staying with me when you got out.”
“Yeah, right. Like you’re a regular Florence Nightingale.”
“You wound me, Sizemore.”
“Hey, I don’t care what you had to tell them. Thanks. I owe you.”
“I was serious,” Beau said. “There’s an extra room at my sister’s place. You can crash there for a few days until you’re a hundred percent.”
Bobby stared at her. “You’re serious.”
“Yeah.” Beau shrugged. “You don’t have a steady girlfriend to help you out, and I sure as hell am not gonna root around in your bedroom looking for clean sheets. So you’ll stay with us a couple of days. It’s a done deal.”
“Your sister’s okay with this?”
“Jilly’s cool.”
“Yeah, I remember. Okay,” Bobby said after a long moment, his voice rougher than it had been. “So when am I getting out of here?”
“The nurses told me you’ll probably get transferred to a regular room today, then one more day of observation. You ought to be out of here before Thanksgiving.”
He dropped his head against the pillow and sighed. “Man, it can’t be too soon. I can’t wait to put on a pair of pants.”
Beau grinned. “Tired of flashing your tackle at all the medical personnel?”
“It’s downright humiliating having all these good-looking women completely ignore my stellar assets.” He looked at her hopefully. “Maybe they’re all lesbians.”
“I think that’s statistically unlikely, partner.”
“Speaking of hot lesbians—”
“Maybe you want to give your imagination a rest until you recover a little more.” Beau was pretty sure she knew the direction his mind was headed.
“So, Dr. Torveau,” Bobby said, ignoring her warning. “We’re sure about her—interests, right? Because she can definitely give me a—”
“Don’t go there,” Beau warned lightly. If it had been any guy other than Bobby she might’ve been tempted to throttle him just for mentioning Ali’s name with that smirk on his face. “If you weren’t an invalid, I might be tempted to put you and your equipment out of commission.”
“Hey, I’m just saying. She’s hot.”
“Good to see your brain survived intact.”
“Don’t worry. All my important stuff—” Bobby coughed, his breath catching and his face turning red.
Beau quickly got up and filled a Styrofoam cup with ice water from the plastic jug on the table at the foot of his bed. She leaned over and supported his head with one hand while holding the straw with the other so he could drink.
“I told you not to go there until you’re recovered,” she teased.
Bobby released the straw and sagged back, his chest heaving under the thin cotton gown. Sweat dotted his brow. “You score on that front yet? I’m still waiting for my hundred bucks.”
“Hey, the bet was two weeks,” Beau protested automatically, glancing at the monitors above Bobby’s bed. The EKG was jumping all over the place and he didn’t look as solid as he had when she’d walked in. She kept talking, wondering if she should call a nurse. “I’ve still got almost a week before I have to pay up. She has yet to appreciate my many…attributes, but I’m working on it.”
“Uh—”
“Sometimes you have to warm them up a little bit before you make a move.” Beau put the cup down on the table as she spoke, watching the blood pressure curve dip and roll. “You feeling okay?”
“Uh—”
“Breathing bothering you?” Beau asked, trying not to appear alarmed.
“Behind you.”
Beau closed her eyes for a second, then turned, knowing what she’d find. Ali leaned in the doorway, a chart tucked under her arm, regarding Beau with a flat, closed expression.
“Fuck,” Beau whispered.
“Good morning,” Ali said quietly. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting outside, I need to examine him.”
“Sure.” Beau’s throat was desert dry. She’d been hoping she’d see Ali this morning, but this wasn’t the way she’d pictured it. She didn’t even bother to search for an excuse. She squeezed Bobby’s leg. “I’ll see you later. Get some rest.”
“Will do,” Bobby said, shooting her a sympathetic glance.
Beau started toward the door and Ali sidestepped her, not even sparing her a glance as she went to Bobby’s bedside. Perfect. Just a perfect ending to an already crappy morning.
*
After finishing rounds, Ali went directly to the nurses’ station to write orders and notes on the patients in the unit. She was due in the OR in an hour to triple tube a nineteen-year-old boy who’d been thrown off his ATV the afternoon before and broken his neck. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down and in all likelihood would remain so for the rest of his life. Before that, she needed to stop in trauma admitting where Wynter was evaluating a patient with multiple facial fractures.
Beau leaned with her back to the wall a little ways down the hall from Bobby’s room, and Ali angled her body so that she didn’t have to see her. The last thing she needed was to see Beau again. Today. Any day. The very fact that she’d spent any time at all thinking about her during her weekend off infuriated her. And she’d spent way too much time thinking about her. She didn’t intend to expend one more drop of energy on the woman.
“Ali,” Jeffrey Chang, one of the unit nurses, called. “Could you do renewal orders on Williams? His meds are going to outdate today.”
“I don’t have time. Page one of the residents,” Ali snapped, closing one chart and reaching for another one. A second later, she put down her pen and looked up into Jeffrey’s surprised face. “Sorry. Can you take a verbal order to renew the meds and I’ll make sure someone comes by to review the rest of his orders?”
“Sure, Ali. Thanks.”
Ali quickly scrawled progress notes in the other four charts, entered essential orders into the computer, and scanned the most recent lab reports waiting to be filed. Then she squared her shoulders and started down the hall toward the elevator.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Beau said, pushing away from the wall as Ali drew nearer.
“I’m sorry, I’m late. Your friend is stable.”
“It’s not about Bobby.” Beau hurried to keep pace with Ali. “Look, I know you’ve got work to do and I don’t want to keep you, but—”
Ali stopped so abruptly Beau bumped into her shoulder. “Please don’t say it isn’t what I think. You’re an ass, Cross, and how I ever let myself forget that for even a day I will never know. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“You’re right,” Beau said to Ali’s back. “I’m a complete jackass. A total jerk. Not worth a second of your time.”
Against her better judgment, against every functioning brain cell that she still had left, Ali slowed, waiting for the punch line. When none came, she pivoted and raised one eyebrow. “And? So far we agree.”
Beau walked toward her, looking better than any woman had a right to look in low-slung faded blue jeans that clung to her narrow hips and a long-sleeved navy Henley unbuttoned to between her breasts. Ali didn’t want to acknowledge the totally reflexive clutch of her stomach, so she folded her arms under her breasts and steeled herself against any further reaction.
“Bobby bet me after class that first night that I couldn’t get you to go out with me. I figured he was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. So I took the bet and played along.”
“You’ve obviously had a lot of practice playing,” Ali said, hating that it hurt even a little that Beau had been pursuing her to score points on her partner. “I hope you won’t be out too much money.”
“Ali,” Beau said, Ali’s dismissal twisting through her chest like a dull knife. “I don’t want you to go out with me because of the bet. I’m sorry about that bet and I’m sorry you
heard us talking about it, but I can’t change it.”
“Can we just let this drop,” Ali said wearily. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. You probably do too.”
“I know you have to go. I just—I can’t stop thinking about you. Okay? It’s driving me a little bit crazy.”
Ali had never been the focus of such intense attention from anyone. The undisguised want in Beau’s eyes was intoxicating. She didn’t even recognize her own reaction, but she knew—the way an animal senses danger—that she could easily drown in those deep blue pools of yearning and desire. She backed up. “Is this the part where you warm me up before making your big move?”
Beau winced, grateful Ali couldn’t know she’d been starring in every one of Beau’s fantasies for days. Christ, just standing next to her had her hot and hard. “No, this is the part where I grovel. The warm-up part is supposed to be more pleasant.”
Ali laughed despite herself. Beau was so damn hard to resist. “I really have to go.”
“Can I call you? Please, can I just call you?”
“You can call.” Ali heard the words come out of her mouth and wondered who had taken control of her rational senses. “I don’t know if I’ll answer.”
“You will,” Beau called after her, “because I know you don’t want me to suffer.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Ali replied as the elevator doors slid closed, but she was smiling. Just a little.
Beau sighed in relief as the tension drained away and anticipation curled through her belly. She didn’t have a win, but she had a chance. Suddenly, a chance with Ali seemed more exciting than anything she could ever remember.
Chapter Thirteen
I know you don’t want me to suffer.
Ali watched the light above the elevator doors flicker from five to one, Beau’s disarming grin and teasing words following her all the way down to the first floor. She didn’t want Beau to suffer, but she wished she could hold on to her anger for a little while all the same. Knowing she had been the object of a puerile, testosterone-fueled bet between Beau and Bobby should have been enough to permanently banish Beau from her thoughts. At the very least, she ought to be infuriated and turned off.
She wasn’t. The remorse in Beau’s eyes had seemed genuine, as if Beau’s regret was about more than just being caught out. Of course, she could be deluding herself because Beau’s interest was so damn hard to ignore. Maybe what she’d thought she’d seen in those bedroom eyes had only been wishful thinking on her part, and she just didn’t want to accept that Beau’s flattering and disturbingly pleasant attention was all a ruse.
“Pathetic,” Ali muttered, striding rapidly down the hall to trauma admitting. A scruffy-looking man in a tattered canvas barn coat nearly knocked her over as he stormed away from the reception window opposite the ER nurse’s station, cursing audibly. Ali jumped out of his way, vowing to stop worrying about Beau’s intentions and her own paradoxical reactions. She didn’t have room for personal distractions now.
She hit the red button on the wall to open the metal doors that separated trauma admitting from the rest of the ER, hung her white coat from a peg on a wall rack, and continued down the hallway into the trauma bay. Only one of the treatment beds was occupied. A blond female lay partially exposed with a sheet across her midsection, EKG leads attached to her limbs, a breathing tube in her throat, multiple intravenous lines coiled around her arms, and a urinary catheter snaking from underneath one thigh to a clear plastic collection bag on the floor. The monitors indicated a steady pulse and blood pressure. Wynter stood in front of an array of facial CT scans hanging on a view box, her folded arms resting over the swell of her belly.
“Morning,” Wynter said as she glanced over at Ali.
“Hi,” Ali said, checking the name on the scans. Trina Campbell. Age: 28. “What do you have?”
“This is her third trip to the emergency room in four months. The first time she had a fractured wrist. The second a nondisplaced nasal fracture. This time she has bilateral orbital fractures, a mandibular angle fracture, and intracranial contusions.”
“Mental status?”
Wynter shook her head. “She was comatose on arrival, Glasgow seven.”
“Family?” Ali studied each frame, all the while suppressing her outrage. A Glasgow coma scale of seven indicated severely depressed brain function. Someone had beaten this woman, and not for the first time. And this time she might not recover.
“A neighbor saw the apartment door open, went in, and found her on the floor in the bedroom. The husband hasn’t been located.”
“What about the police?”
“The paramedics called it in. No one has come in for a report yet.”
“Okay,” Ali said. “Where do we stand with neurosurgery?”
“The fellow was by and said he’d make sure his attending saw the films before they started their first case. I think Barnett is on call. The fellow thinks they’ll need to put in a bolt for intracranial pressure monitoring, but they can do that at the bedside between cases.”
“Is the unit ready for her?”
“Not yet,” Wynter said. “They were just giving report when I called. We weren’t pushed down here, so I thought—”
“That’s fine. We can keep her here a while longer. Do you want Tony to scrub with me on the triple tubes or let general surgery take it?”
“Tony needs to do the debridement on that kid with the shotgun blast. Why don’t I take the general surgery resident through the triple tubes?” Wynter suggested.
“Are you sure? You’ve done plenty of them already and you’ll save your legs for later in the day.”
“I got plenty of rest this weekend.” Wynter glanced across the room at Nancy Carpenter, one of the day nurses, and lowered her voice. “In between marathon bouts of sex, that is. I can do it.”
“Go ahead, then.” Ali smiled. “Seeing how you’re rested.”
“How about you?” Wynter said casually as she took the films down off the view box. “Do anything fun over the weekend?”
“Peace and quiet. Just what I wanted.” Ali didn’t think walking Victor, paying bills, catching up on back issues of the Journal of Trauma, and wasting time thinking about a woman whose shelf life was shorter than ice cream in August qualified as “fun” in Wynter’s book.
Wynter gave her a look but must have seen that Ali didn’t want to talk about her weekend, because she didn’t poke at her. “I guess I’ll head up to the OR, then.”
“I’ll be down here,” Ali said. “Any problems, let me know.”
“Should be routine,” Wynter said as she walked to the automatic sliding doors that separated the trauma bay from the hall outside.
As the doors whooshed open, Ali heard shouting. “Nancy, are we expecting a patient?”
“We didn’t get an alert,” the petite African American replied.
“Maybe one of the rescue units had radio problems and just decided to come on in.” Ali walked out into the hall and caught the tail end of a string of curses. Her shoulders tightened. Wynter stood white-faced in front of the locker room, staring back down the hall with a stunned expression. Ali followed her gaze and recoiled as if someone had struck her in the face.
The man in the dirty canvas coat stood just inside the secure area with his arm outstretched, holding a handgun aimed at Wynter.
*
Beau hurried through the lobby and out to the street, planning to take the subway-surface car to the station house to talk Captain Jeffries into putting her back on rotation. She heard the sirens before she reached the sidewalk. An engine, a medical unit, and three police cars careened around the corner and stopped in front of the hospital. She recognized her squad and jogged over to one of the firefighters climbing down from the truck.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” Davey Wallace said, leaning on the rig while Captain Jeffries talked into a radio. “We got called as support.”
Police cruisers, light bars f
lashing, blocked the street in both directions. A van bristling with antennae pulled up. Mobile command post. The back doors burst open and a SWAT team in full gear jumped out and ran down the driveway toward the emergency room entrance. Beau watched them go with a sinking feeling. Something bad was going down. She pushed her way through the crowd up to Jeffries.
“Captain! Do you know—”
“Gunman,” he said tersely. “Hospital’s on lockdown.”
“Where?” Beau asked, turning cold inside.
“A nurse in the ER called it in. What are you doing here?”
“I was upstairs with Bobby.” Beau hesitated, checking out the security guards blocking the lobby doors she’d just exited and judging her chances of getting back into the hospital if it was locked down. Some maniac had a gun in the ER. Ali might be there somewhere. Jeffries must have seen where she was looking, because he got up in her face.
“Don’t even think about it. No heroics today. Understand?”
She grabbed his arm. “Look—I’m TER-OPS. I want in on this.”
He gave her a hard look. “First team is standing by to follow SWAT in. Get geared up and report to Risa Santos.”
“Yes sir,” Beau said, then paused. “Thank you.”
*
“Don’t move,” the gunman shouted. His voice quivered and his eyes flickered wildly from Wynter to Ali.
“Whatever you need, I can get you,” Ali said calmly. All she could think about was protecting Wynter and her baby, and that meant keeping his attention on her. “She can’t help you, but I can.”
Her words had the desired effect. He swung his gun away from Wynter and toward Ali. She raised her hands, holding his attention.
“I’m in charge here. I’m the one you want.”
As she spoke, she slowly crossed the hall until she was between the gunman and Wynter. Keeping her eyes on him, she said to Wynter in a low voice, “Go into the locker room, lock the door, and don’t come out until the police arrive.”