by Olivia Gates
That was the perfect rationale and the clearest explanation! A point for her theoretical knowledge. He nodded his agreement to Anita who implemented Savannah’s directions at once.
But he wasn’t surprised to find that part of her knowledge solid. During their time in the same teaching hospital, he’d learned she had an aptitude for information-gathering and processing, the talent that had got her straight As all through her education. But she also combined that skill with no desire whatsoever to apply her knowledge. In his opinion, that made her worse than a knowledge-deficient yet committed doctor. Ready and assured surgical prowess wasn’t as easy to achieve as memorizing textbooks. It took relentless application, nerve, and a lot of caring for one’s patients. All of which she’d lacked.
Savannah pressed closer as he started the procedure. “Since Garcia is just sedated, and since you’ve run for stent grafts, I assume you’re attempting an endovascular repair first?”
He injected the local anesthetic block of the femoral nerve. “Yes. I won’t risk the high morbidity and mortality associated with open surgical repair as long as Garcia hasn’t entered frank circulatory collapse yet. I have to try minimally invasive routes first.”
“Ah, what you’re famous for.” She remembered that? Strange. He’d believed she’d never really registered anything about him.
Savannah took the empty anesthetic syringe from him, handed him the scalpel. “In Richardson Memorial, endovascular grafts, combined with hypotensive hemostasis and other endovascular techniques, including proximal balloon control, have become the norm in treating ruptured AAAs.”
Had they now? And she kept abreast with the latest developments and trends? “Have you participated in any yourself?”
“I did a few during my stint in vascular surgery, early fifth residency year. Six, to be exact.”
Oh. “Elective aneurysm repair?”
“Ruptured ones. From leaking to catastrophic. Four are still alive two years later.”
Could she be exaggerating? That was an impressive result by any standards, since more than fifty per cent of treated ruptured AAAs died of complications within thirty days of surgery. Not to mention those who died intra-operatively, or even before that.
He opened his mouth to ask for the guide-wire, but Savannah was already handing it to him. He stared at her, at a loss for a second. Shaking himself, he turned to Anita. “Prepare for arteriography.”
Anita handed him the contrast material injection, the radio-opaque solution that would make the artery visible in X-ray imaging, showing the exact position where the aorta was abnormally dilated into an aneurysm, and the point where it had ruptured. The OR technician maneuvered the arteriographic X-ray machine overhead.
Javier made the incision into the skin and subcutaneous fat of the groin. Savannah anticipated his request for tissue retraction and helped him gain exposure of the femoral artery. He introduced the guide-wire into the artery and advanced it until he entered the supracoeliac aorta under X-ray guidance, watching his progress on the monitor.
“What if the aorto-iliac anatomy isn’t suitable for stent grafting?”
Her question brought his eyes back to her. It was an advanced bit of vascular surgery knowledge to understand that if the artery was kinked or narrowed before the dilation of the aneurysm, it was out of the question to repair the rupture by grafting the intra-arterial prosthesis inside the aorta, holding it in place by metal braces or stents. Maybe she hadn’t been exaggerating her experience after all.
“Let’s hope Garcia continues to be a textbook case, Savannah.”
And he was. He had perfect aortic anatomy—except for the ruptured aneurysm. After Javier introduced the balloon catheter into the artery he found himself saying, “Would you like to do it?”
Savannah jerked up in surprise, her stunning eyes, all he could see of her now, settling on him for an eloquent second. Dios! He couldn’t believe his hardening body, here, now!
“Sure.” Savannah’s hand took over his grip on the catheter, then with steady, practiced movements, she expanded the metal stent to fit against the inside of the aorta, reinforcing its wall and holding the synthetic sleeve in place, bridging and sealing the rupture. No doubt now. She’d done this many times before, and had done it well.
After checking the stability of their graft, they worked together as if they’d been doing so all their lives, closing up, placing drains in Garcia’s abdomen to siphon off the blood that had collected there and auto-infusing it back into him after washing and filtering it through a cell-saver device. Afterwards they re-checked his vitals, topped off his sedation and analgesia, then accompanied him to Intensive Care.
Javier walked out of IC behind Savannah, the elation of a surgery well performed and a coworker saved fading, confusion and agitation replacing it, warring for dominance in his chest.
Sending Savannah away had been a simple matter of pragmatism before. Or that would have been his argument. She was unqualified, on all counts, period.
He’d been wrong on one count, the one that mattered most. She was surgically competent. So what excuse could he give GAO—worse, give her—as he looked her in the eye and told her to leave? His belief that she would melt in the heat of toil and discomfort was only his opinion. No one, starting with her, was bound to take it.
So what could he say? That he couldn’t function with her around? That his mind had emptied of everything but the need to drag her back to his room, rip her out of her clothes and bury himself in her, take her, then take her again until he’d made up for just the first few days of the three years without her?
They reentered his room and he leaned on the door, his hormones roaring with every move she made. Then she turned to him and had him ready to relinquish all sanity, just standing there. It had to be witchcraft. Mind-bending and ruinous…
“Do you still want me to leave, Javier?”
No! Don’t leave. You’re all wrong and damaging and out of my league. But stay. Stay until you’ve finished me.
His pager went off. Gracias Dios!
He walked out without a word.
Savannah fell to the bed, her eyes feeling like hot gravel, her chest a smoldering coal. What a mistake it had been, coming here. It had to be her last with him. Any more would finish her.
“‘Do you still want me to leave, Javier?”’
Her heart lurched in her throat at hearing her own words, mockingly repeated like a slowed-down tape. She jerked up.
Javier. It was only Javier.
But in the next split second, her relief froze into dread at witnessing what filled his eyes. Hatred.
“‘I don’t want to go, Daddy.”’ He mimicked her again, the loathing deepening. “And Daddy made sure you wouldn’t, didn’t he?”
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
He held up a paper in front of her eyes, let it go. It tumbled into her lap, as he snarled at her. “I’m talking about this!”
CHAPTER TWO
“THIS is a delightful piece of coercion, isn’t it?”
Savannah’s eyes avoided the venom in Javier’s, ran over the fax.
He went on. “Did you dictate it over the phone? Or did you leave it up to ‘Daddy’ and his legal bloodhounds?”
She struggled to make sense of the convoluted legal language and missed half of it. But one thing shrieked at her, without the least pretense of finesse or the usual legal euphemisms, overbearing, openly threatening.
If she went, so did GAO’s backing of the MSU and its missions.
Oh, damn! Who was responsible for this?
What kind of a fool question was that? Her father, of course. He’d probably got Mark to take care of the arm-twisting, and Lucas of the paper- and legwork.
But why?
Even though she’d told her father that going back wouldn’t mean going back to him, it had to be a step in the right direction in his opinion. He’d have her where he could continue to work on her until she gave in, rejoined the ranks and became o
nce more part of the sparkling display he’d been pushing her to be since the day she’d been born.
So why make it possible for her to stay away? And here, of all places?
Only one thing could have made him do this. His abhorrence of Javier! And it seemed that telling him about Javier’s refusal to work with her had suggested the perfect way to get back at the man he’d hated to see on her mind and in her bed. No matter what, Javier Sandoval didn’t boss Jacob Richardson’s daughter around.
But there was more. It was all congealing into one ugly piece of insight.
Following the workings of her father’s elitist mind and looking through his manipulative eyes, this had to be an all-objectives-achieved coup. He’d drive Javier to the ground, tower over him and show him who was boss, and then his fragile daughter would get all uncomfortable and miss her Jacuzzi and pedicurist’s services and run home on her own.
This last bit of rationalization had to be why he’d stopped fighting her over coming to Colombia in the first place. Oh, let the headstrong girl have her way. Resist her and she’ll play the martyr. Let her go and she’ll be back with her tail between her legs in no time.
All in all, a perfect set-up.
No wonder Javier was boiling. If not as much as she was.
Daddy dearest had a call coming all right. A wake-up call. It was finally time to give him a crash course on the lines she wouldn’t let him cross. Maybe she was as fragile as they both thought she was, and she had let him push her around all her life, but she was damned if she’d let him push Javier around, too!
“I believe this belongs to me.” Javier’s bronzed fingers eased the fax out of hers with great restraint. “I’m sure you’ll get, or you already have, your own copy.”
She clung to his hand, stopped him as he stepped away. “I won’t—I don’t. Javier, this isn’t my doing!”
Insistent, controlled strength took him out of her reach, his considering glance moving like a sweep of acid across her skin. She would rather he’d slapped her. “It never is, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean with you it’s always someone else’s doing, someone else’s fault. Your mother made you get engaged to Jordan, your friends convinced you Andrew was the man for you, then your father decreed you were made for Mark, his protégé and heir apparent. Belinda made you go to the party from hell, then someone there made you escape it, then—”
“Then I made you come to my rescue, then made you sleep with me. It seems some things are my doing after all.”
“None of that was ‘doing’, just reacting.”
“And what was your excuse?”
“None. I was reacting, too. But I stopped.”
Yeah, he had, hadn’t he? Just like that. He’d decided there and then that it had been time to stop “reacting”, to start acting. He’d stepped out of her bed, had left her there still quivering with his last explosive pleasuring, and had never looked back. And he was now rubbing it in that she’d never stopped to think of the consequences of her “reactions”. And she hadn’t, certainly not with him. Not then, not now.
He was also telling her what she’d been to him. A knee-jerk reaction, an impulse it had taken a moment’s clarity to grow sick of, to walk away from.
Did he know he’d found the best method of hurting her?
If he was out to do that, she couldn’t blame him. He must think she was doing the same, messing up his life’s ambition, what he’d invested all his fortune and time and aspiration in. But it was so ambitious that he’d needed help, and had spent six years slaving for the kind of unconditional support that would leave him in charge and wouldn’t exploit his success or corrupt his purpose.
Now he’d been made aware that all his work had been in vain, that he wasn’t really in charge and would never be, that conditions could be made at random and new terms invented, that someone could yank his strings and his project’s as and when their whims dictated.
Impotence and wrath and humiliation must have eaten him through to the bone by now.
The only way to absorb his fury was to tell him that he could shred that fax, kick her out and nothing would happen, that it was an empty threat, that she’d make sure it was.
But would that be enough? Would he forget the slap? Could he go on from here pretending not to see the leash now he knew it existed?
She had to try. “Javier, let’s not make this personal—”
“I beg to differ. Let’s. It’s very personal to me after all—though I’m sure you can’t possibly know what that feels like.”
She took a moment to wait out the sting. “Maybe—but I do know how you feel, how personal this is to you. It was the only thing you ever talked to me about, so I know. But this ultimatum—it isn’t going to happen. Whatever legal mumbo jumbo this says, it won’t come to pass. If I leave, GAO’s backing won’t be following me.”
“How kind of you to grant me this.”
“I’m not granting you anything. My father has interfered again, unasked and unfairly—”
“Unfairly? Unfair is when he gave you a two-mile private beach on the Caribbean and gave his new wife a ten-mile one. This I call coercive, fraudulent, unethical—even criminal.”
“I won’t make excuses for him. There are none.”
“Very gracious of you.”
“Oh, please! Listen, Javier, you have every right to be angry, every right to feel insulted, oppressed and threatened. But I will reverse this.”
He recoiled from the hand that touched his muscled arm, moved to the door. Oh, no. He wasn’t walking away before she’d had her say this time.
She ran round him, spread her arms across the door. He’d have to go through her if he wanted to get out.
His arms spread out, too, echoing his frustrated expression. “Haven’t I already expressed my gratitude that you will call your dogs off? Now I have work to do. The MSU won’t be deployed on its own, you know.”
“They’re not my dogs! But I’ll make sure nothing like this ever happens again, not from anyone I know. I understand it won’t be much of a consolation, even if they swear in binding documents that they’ll never spring ultimatums on you again. The memory that they’ve dictated to you and could have gotten away with it won’t go away soon. I am truly sorry that I can’t erase that. But maybe through my own efforts, I can atone for it.”
Oh, God, why was he looking at her that way? As if she’d grown a new pair of eyes?
Just say this, put your cards on the table.
She had to breathe first, before she blacked out. “I came here to work, Javier…” She paused for another breath. “And for many other reasons, too. I joined GAO a year ago, trained hard and worked locally with them. But I did have my eye on this project of yours. How could I not when I’d heard so much about it from you? I didn’t think they’d give me such an important mission on my first time out, but they think I’m qualified for this, and I want to see if they’re right, to see this through. I want to be of use and of service, and maybe make that little bit of a difference, too. But I don’t want to be here against your wishes. I won’t be. It is up to you whether I stay or go. If you really think the MSU’s mission would be better off without me, if you have someone else in mind who’s better qualified and who’s more motivated, say so now and I will go. Just promise you won’t let anger answer for you.”
Savannah’s words washed over Javier, drowned his fury, flooded his thoughts.
Who was this woman?
Was this the same woman he’d known in total intimacy? She had the same voice, the same body, the same brutal attraction. But was that the same character? The same mind?
The mind he remembered had been focused on fashion and entertainment trivia, on hedonistic pleasures. By necessity it had also contained the medical information that had seen her through medical school and the first three years of residency, but that, along with every relevant thing, had been undetectable. Or had that been his clouded perception? Had this mind alw
ays inhabited the body he’d worshipped, and it had been him who’d been too inflamed to see beyond the sexual promise?
Maldita sea—he’d never even heard her talk so much, and certainly not in such an ordered or impassioned way. She’d always said little, communicated less, and had then just conveyed how alien they’d been to one another. The rest had been lost in frenzied passion. Or had it been him who’d never given her the chance to say much, with his hands and lips and body all over her, bent on making her as breathless for him as he’d been for her?
No, he didn’t think so. So had she changed? Grown up? But could anyone simply develop the kind of insight that had analyzed his feeling of oppression, and the logic and delicacy that had defused it?
This was looking worse by the second. For if the frivolous girl she’d been had twisted him around her finger, what would a more complex woman do to him?
Ah, Dios, why had she come?
She wanted to stay, to work, she’d said. And for many other reasons, too. What reasons? Was he among them? And if he was, then as what? There’d only ever been one thing between them. Sex. Was it what she still wanted from him? Did he want her to want it from him?
Who was he kidding? Wanting her, wanting her to want him was the only thing he was sure of, no matter how wrong, how pointless and destructive it was, or how hard he fought against it.
“So what do you say, Javier? Just put me out of my misery, OK?”
His eyes swung back to her, found her sitting on the bed flushed and expectant and ripe. Waiting for his verdict. Put her out of her misery. And yourself.
He pushed her flat on her back in his mind, and she writhed to the floor. He followed, his body and his tongue thrusting at her heat, in her mouth, his hands finding her, driving her to her first climax. Then she begged him, for him, and he gave her, almost clothed, almost violent, as she loved him to be that first time, just pushing inside her, pounding her to completion. Then he turned her…