by Olivia Gates
CHAPTER THREE
“I DIDN’T laugh!”
Savannah almost leapt after the denial, wishing she could retrieve it, erase it.
For she had!
Oh, she’d gaped first, her mouth an open portrayal of stunned incredulity. Then, to her everlasting mortification, she had laughed.
“You laughed, Savannah.” Javier’s bored assertion shriveled her with shame and regret all over again. Not that he seemed to feel anything nearly that distressing—or anything at all. “And it’s OK. It was a perfectly normal and deserved reaction.”
“It isn’t OK, Javier, and neither was it normal or deserved. The way I reacted—you never gave me a chance to explain…”
“You didn’t need to explain anything, Savannah, not then, not now. My proposal was ridiculous, in the heat of…the moment, and I didn’t answer your calls afterwards because there was nothing more to talk about. It was never about talking between us.”
Talking, signifying something valid and human and meaningful—as opposed to what they’d shared. What had that been in his opinion? Something carnal and base and worthless? Was he twisting the knife?
He probably wasn’t. From her behavior with him, he must be convinced the knife wouldn’t find anything to hurt. She’d been convinced of that, too. But if all this pain didn’t indicate things being shredded inside her, what did it signify?
She heaved in a breath, tried again. “I did try to talk to you then, and if you’d let me—”
“What would you have said? Would you have accepted my proposal?”
No. It had been out of the question.
He knew it, too. “No, you wouldn’t, and if you had it would have just been more awkward. I would have told you to forget I ever offered. As I already said, by then I’d come to my senses, and when I did I had no clue why I’d asked you to marry me. There wasn’t one reason to—OK, one reason.”
Sex.
“But sex never held up an affair, let alone a marriage.”
No. But why had the pain endured for so many years? Could sex alone do this to a soul—hollow it out, fill it up with obsessions and stay at the focus of it all? Did sex alone account for all she’d gone through those past three years? All the suffering, all the changes? Was she that shallow? That basic?
Javier was moving away, ending this. “For whatever reasons, you’re here, and I’ve welcomed you as part of this mission. We have nothing to do with the past now. There’s nothing to say about the past, and that, Savannah, is that.”
Her hand gripped his steel biceps, clung even when he stopped and turned to her, when she cursed herself for building his case against her. “That’s not that. Not when it ended in anger…”
His lips twisted. “It wasn’t anger, just dented pride. I knew the moment the words left my lips how ridiculous my proposal was, but it still stung to have you corroborate my opinion. Must be that Latin chauvinism you talked about. Perhaps I’m not as liberal and progressive as I like to think I am.”
And that was really that, huh? Once the sexual haze had lifted, he’d been horrified he’d made the offer and had only been grateful she’d turned him down. She’d never touched any of his vital components, just hit his erogenous zones and ended up scratching his Latin pride. And in under twenty-four hours of seeing him again, she’d managed to do just that again.
But if he’d brought up the way she’d laughed, it must mean it still rankled, no matter what he said. Surely it was still worth a try to talk this through. “But just now, you said—”
“I was just giving you an example of what a man would be likely to hold a grudge about, not saying that I am.” Ha. She was still trying to twist whatever he said to suit her purposes, wasn’t she? “I’m not holding a grudge, Savannah. Far from it. But I do question our ability to work together. That scene back there is testament to that. Sex and work never mix. As for your ability to work here, I’m still skeptical, but that has nothing to do with any bitterness I harbor. Believe me, there’s none. Last but not least, I question our ability to co-lead a crew who’ll be snickering behind our backs—in our faces, too, if Alonso has anything to say about it—after what they’ve just witnessed. But you’re here, you want to stay, so may it turn out for the best.”
“If you’re sure this is how you feel…”
“It is. Now, if you’ll excuse me, since we’re staying here for a while, I’ll go back to the hospital, check up on a few things. We’ll continue our tour when I come back.”
Javier turned and strode out of the MSU, leaving her behind, a knot in her gut, a fist in her chest.
A tap on her shoulder brought her spinning round, and she forced back the tears. “Elvira! Hi, there.”
Elvira gave her a shrewd look that saw it all and decided on the best course of action. “Would you like me to take you over the rest of the MSU?”
Oh, lord. Did she look in need of such careful treatment? It wasn’t a great idea to start this mission looking like the going-to-pieces female that she was at the moment.
Savannah turned on her brightest smile. “That would be great. Just don’t tell anyone I didn’t know it all on my own. And by everyone I mean the men. In the interests of protecting the female brigade’s elevated status on this mission, of course.”
Elvira’s sharp-boned features stilled, gauging Savannah’s reaction. Then she laughed. “My lips are sealed, Dr. Richardson.”
Savannah breathed. This was better. “I swear I did my homework, only to find Javier had changed the syllabus.” She told Elvira what had happened, drew more of her chuckles. “And, hey—it’s Savannah. Savvy if you’re into nicknames. Not that that describes me either!”
Elvira laughed again. “I like you, whether you’re a Savannah or a Savvy or not!”
A tingle of satisfaction ran through Savannah. “I like you, too, and I think I’ll love working together, working here. This is nothing like anything I’ve tried before.”
They walked to the back of the trailer, reentered the compartment where they’d walked in on her and Javier. They stopped at a row of panels and a platform and Elvira activated a digital mechanism. Savannah watched in amazement as the panels whirred open, revealing computers, monitors and a complete anesthesia suite. The platform became a state-of-the-art operating table. “That’s as high-tech as anything I’ve seen where I’ve worked. Not that we have the sci-fi unfolding mechanisms. No space issues in a hospital!”
“The locking-unfolding mechanism isn’t only for space issues, but security issues, too.”
“You mean in case of…?” Attacks. Of course. That had to be taken into account, considering where their mission would take them.
“Many mobile units before us were commandeered, dismantled and sold piece by piece. This way, they can’t take anything apart without destroying it, forcing them to either leave the unit alone, or try to sell it whole, maybe getting caught while they’re at it.”
That hadn’t even occurred to Savannah. And she’d been so certain she’d taken everything into account!
Savannah sighed. “I see you’ve left out our fate if that happens.”
“Oh, they usually take your stuff and let you go.”
“But not always.”
Elvira’s glance was long and telling. “No, not always.”
Savannah nodded. That she’d faced. The danger. She’d known about it before coming here. The MSU was out seeking people trapped in dangerous places after all, so stepping into the crossfire was a definite possibility.
Elvira went on. “Once the unit expands, there will be two more OR stations just like that. The vertical expansion will accommodate the mounted ceiling OR lights. The ceilings and walls have the integrated systems as well as the speakers for the com system and CD-radio. Here…” She pointed at dials. “The heating and cooling systems, the ninety-nine per cent HEPA filtration and humidification and dehumidification controls, with temperature ranges from -20 to 120.”
Savannah was more impressed by the minute. “Th
at’s a replica of the environment of our ORs, and those are the best on the planet. But let me guess some stuff on my own. That’s the water system—fresh-water tank, gray and black water tanks. And this has to be the equipment package storage. Is this where we keep the extra OR tables, cautery, crash carts and all the other OR stuff?”
Elvira nodded, her smile widening. “So I didn’t need to tell you everything after all.”
Afterwards they walked out to the diagnostic compartment with its X-ray and CT machines, then the lab and lastly the preoperative and recovery area where Caridad was sound asleep.
After a moment’s pause Elvira tilted her head. “You must come from a very advanced medical center if this is what you’re used to. I’d never seen anything like this before the MSU.”
“I worked in one of the US’s largest teaching hospitals during my residency. Then I had a year at Richardson Memorial.”
Elvira’s slanted eyes rounded. “You’re one of those Richardsons?”
Savannah winced at the expected reaction. The Richardsons were second only to the Kennedys in fame, probably first in infamy, even in this neck of the woods. “’Fraid so!”
Heavy color stained Elvira’s dark skin. “I didn’t mean to sound so—so…”
“I understand. Really.” And she did. Being a Richardson had always been the albatross she’d borne around her neck. She seemed destined to cart it around for the rest of her life!
Elvira regained her composure with admirable ease. “And that’s how you met Javier? When he was in the States, obtaining funding and making instrument deals for the MSU?”
Had she really hoped Elvira wouldn’t bring her relationship with Javier up after they’d seen her devouring him and heard her lame explanations? We go back and sort of, indeed!
Oh, what the hell! Give the woman something to satisfy her curiosity.
“Javier saved me from a bunch of thugs who were out to rape and kill me. Then we…met sometimes while he was in the States, until he left.”
A few minutes later Elvira had left the MSU, leaving Savannah squirming.
She hadn’t had to water down her relationship with Javier for Elvira’s benefit. A couple of sentences had summed it all up. Was it any wonder Javier was all contempt?
But why should he be? So it hadn’t been profound. But it had been unstoppable and, to her, unrepeatable. And it had had a touch of destiny, too, that the stranger who’d emerged from the night to save her, to teach her what being a woman was all about, had turned out to be someone she’d see every day for months to come…
Oh, all right. So destiny hadn’t had much of a hand there. It had been thanks to her misguided junior resident Jeff that Javier had come to her rescue when he had. Believing Javier likely to be carrying some choice Colombian stash, Jeff had invited Javier to the party from hell, which he’d left in disgust at the same time she had.
After their night-long lovemaking, she’d found out he’d been on a six-month tutoring assignment in her teaching hospital, training surgeons in a revolutionary minimally invasive surgical technique he’d mastered, in exchange for the instruments he’d needed for his MSU project. He’d also been recruiting GAO’s help and connections in establishing the project and obtaining Colombian governmental permits for its missions.
They hadn’t worked together. And his crammed agenda had limited their time together to an hour per day, an hour spent in frenzied lovemaking before he’d left again, never even spending the night like that first night.
But anything with him had been enough. The passion, the pleasure, the freedom had been so unknown that she’d been intoxicated, delirious—wild—and had remained so through it all. After two engagements and a marriage, pointless, passionless and painless to live through and to sever, she’d given up on expectations and on herself, and hadn’t been thinking of tomorrow. Or at all. Why think when she’d believed there’d never be more for her, when she hadn’t been able to believe she’d even found that much, when everything had had a time limit? Then he’d hit her with a true bolt from the blue: an offer to extend it indefinitely.
No wonder she’d laughed! At the inconceivability of it all.
Javier asking her to marry him? What could he have seen in her, his antithesis? Soft and indulged and conforming where he was tough and self-made and enterprising?
It had been a total shock. He hadn’t once hinted at any future for them. The only plans he’d talked about had been for the MSU; the only thing he’d made clear had been that he had no place in his life for a woman. One objective had filled him, one blaze of commitment had fired his soul: shifting to full-time humanitarian work in his homeland.
Her own life had also been planned out, but for her, and it hadn’t even occurred to her till then to contest the script. She’d finish her residency, become the next prerequisite Richardson in general surgery, and live out her life a part of the elite Richardson world, unhappily ever after. Period.
So what possible reason had he had? Could her father have been right? Had Javier been out to add social status, connections and old money to his success?
That doubt had never taken hold. She hadn’t been able to picture Javier as a social climber. So she’d looked for other explanations, and had found nothing, hadn’t been able to conceive how Javier could have thought she would have been any good at being his wife.
But she had been good at being his lover. For months after he’d walked away, she’d burned with misery and the need to make him see her point, convince him to return to their former arrangement.
Then finally she’d realized what she’d been doing. She’d been after him to make a case against herself, to convince him how useless she’d be to him, how worthless she was. And it had appalled her. It had woken her up.
She’d reached the conclusion that his proposal had been an impulse, as he’d just confirmed, that he’d “come to his senses”, as he’d put it. She’d stopped trying to reach him and had mentally agreed with his decision to end things completely.
But it seemed she’d been secretly hoping there’d be another explanation after all, that she’d retained a hold over some part of him. Well, there wasn’t and she hadn’t. It had been just a mistake on his part.
And he’d tried to send her away, to save her from the mistake she was making now.
But she was done being saved. And as for this being a mistake, it was up to her to prove it wasn’t.
The long walk back to the hospital had only cranked up Javier’s tension. He almost ran the remaining distance, eager to enter the hospital, to get sucked up in the expected whirlpool.
He wasn’t disappointed. The moment he stepped inside, he was swamped. He welcomed it all as usual, his distraction, his purpose. Cases to admit, patients’ families to reassure, results to review, treatment decisions to make, follow-ups to update, permits to authorize. The work never abated. A good thing, since neither did Savannah’s hold over him.
In an hour he was finished and at a loss again.
Couldn’t he have lingered over it all? Did he have to be so efficient? Now he had a choice between going back to his room to sink in echoes of her scent and presence, or to go back to the MSU and drown in the real thing. And then she might want to talk again, and talking was the last thing he wanted.
Oh, he’d been eloquent, about not holding a grudge and not feeling any bitterness. And he didn’t. None. What he’d felt then, what he discovered he still felt now, was nothing as poisonous as that. At least, not towards her. The corrosive condemnation had all been directed at himself, at his own stupidity.
He should have walked away, fled, after that first night, when she’d reached out and dragged the will out of him. The loss of control he’d felt in wallowing in her pleasures should have been a dire warning. He should have realized how much worse it would become with longer exposure.
And he had understood and had done nothing about it. It had been like knowing an incoming train would pulverize him on impact, yet he’d stood there and wai
ted for it.
Where had been his reason, his self-preservation? How had he let unadulterated lust take him over? How had he become obsessed when they’d shared nothing but fleeting, ferocious surrenders to their bodies’ demands?
Oh, he knew how. Exactly how.
Like any addict, he’d started to look for excuses to rationalize his addiction. He’d told himself that maybe, given time, it would grow beyond physical frenzy, for him, for her. But time had been running out.
So he’d lost his head. That last night, as he’d waited for her in her apartment, he’d manufactured the perfect piece of self-delusion.
Their escalating passion must have been a symptom of something deeper that hadn’t had the opportunity to manifest. How could it when they’d had no time to discover, let alone to explore, common ground? Desperate for their intimacies to continue, he’d blinded himself to the fact that common ground simply couldn’t, and would never, exist. That even if it did, no amount of common ground would ever be enough to bridge their fundamental differences. He’d twisted it until “more” between them had become logical, workable. Once it had, it had been up to him, the man, to make the proposal of something more.
So he had, and had only gotten the slap that had brought him back to his senses. Gracias Dios!
Her reason hadn’t been fogged. She’d known “more” had never been an option, had been incredulous he’d contemplated it. Oh, she’d tried to humor him into a continuation of the status quo. Sort of serving his notice until she’d found someone else to fill his…position. He still remembered that smile as she’d tried to coax him back to bed…So he’d let out the Latin pride he’d never thought he’d had, and had walked out.
She’d still sought him out, insistent, hungry, unable to kick her habit.
The temptation to take that last phone call, snatch that last look, had been brutal. But he’d known that one more look would have snared him, derailed him again. He couldn’t have afforded that. Not then, not now. His energies hadn’t been and weren’t his to squander. So many people needed him, depended on him. And then there always was and always would be his sworn mission.