Lena was coming from the other end of the hall, talking to another nurse. He was really baffled by her. Normally, women liked him. But not her.
She challenged him. And he liked it.
An alarm sounded at the nurses’ station and Lena and the other nurse ran toward one of the rooms.
Over the PA system came a call for help. “I need a crash cart and the code team to Three North. Code team to Three North. Code Blue.”
Dex wasn’t on the code team, but he moved to the room in question. He grabbed gloves and pulled them on. “How can I help?”
Lena and the other nurse were moving around the patient. Lena pulled the pillows from beneath his head and lowered the bed to a flat position. The heart monitor showed a very weak, irregular pulse—V-fib—and the blood pressure monitor beeped to alert to the patient’s low pressure.
Not one of his patients, Dex was relieved to see.
The other nurse began chest compressions. “Can you intubate him?”
Lena pulled out an intubation kit and handed it to him. She laid an Ambu bag out next to the man’s side.
The patient’s eyes were closed, his skin already showing the graying of lack of oxygen. The only movement to the man’s body was from the compressions of the nurse.
Dex moved quickly, inserting the tube in the man’s throat so that they could breathe for him. As soon as he removed his hands from the tube, Lena connected the Ambu bag and started squeezing it, forcing air into the man’s oxygen-deprived lungs.
Still the monitors remained chaotic. The heart rate did not change. In fact, it seemed weaker. CPR continued.
The code team rushed into the room, slamming the cart into the wall in their rush. The doctor running the code took over. “I’m Dr. Clark. I’m leading this code. How long’s he been like this?”
“About two minutes, Dr. Clark. Should we give him epi?” Lena asked.
Dex couldn’t help but admire her professionalism in the chaos of the room. While people were darting quickly here and there, Lena was a calmness in the eye of the storm. She alone seemed unflappable in the moment.
“Yes. One milligram of epi.” Clark reached for the paddles. “Charge the defibrillator. We are going to have to shock him and see if we can get his heart back into rhythm.”
A moment later, the beep indicating the defibrillator was ready sounded. “Okay, everyone clear. Shocking.”
The heart monitor went from jagged spikes to a total flat line.
“Asystole,” Clark said, even though everyone in the room could read the monitor. “Push another round of epi.”
He charged the defibrillator once more. “Okay, everyone clear.”
The man’s body jerked from the power of the shock. Still, the monitor showed only a flat line. No peaks, no valleys. This man wasn’t coming back. And to keep trying would only be a waste of time and resources.
Clark hung the paddles back on the crash cart. He checked for corneal reflex. Tried for a pulse. And last took his stethoscope and listened for breath sounds. Shaking his head, he said, “He’s gone. Time of death: six twenty-one.”
Clark and his team left the room as quickly as they had entered. And in the space of a breath, the chaos from before was gone.
Lena switched off the machines one by one. The room fell into silence. There was a calm that seemed odd when contrasted with the flurry of noise and movement just moments before.
The other nurse laid a hand on Lena’s shoulder. “I’ll make the calls.”
Lena shook her head. “There’s no one to call. No family, no friends. He was all alone.”
“Funeral home then.” The other nurse shrugged and left the room.
Lena took the Ambu bag and tossed it. She removed the tube from the man’s throat that Dex had placed. She started cleaning up the paper wrappings and remnants of trash left from the code. She pulled the electrode pads from the man’s skin and put them in the trash too.
Dex wasn’t sure she realized he was still in the room. She looked utterly heartbroken. The strong, unshakable nurse he’d been admiring during the code had been replaced. Now the woman in front of him looked like she might burst into tears at any given moment.
“Mr. Clemons, this wasn’t how today was meant to end. You were supposed to be going home.” She sniffled. She smoothed the old man’s hair back. “I thought we were going to have ice cream together. I even brought your favorite—chocolate.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She jumped at the sound of his voice. “I thought you’d left with the others.”
“I wanted to be sure you were okay first.”
“Of course I’m okay.” The paleness in her face disagreed with her words, though. “We lose patients all the time. He’s not my first, and I know that unfortunately he won’t be my last.”
“You look shaken by this one, though,” Dex argued.
“If I’m ever not shaken when I lose a patient, that’s the day I quit, because I will have lost more than my patient.” She started disconnecting all the monitors and IVs attached to the now deceased patient.
“Shift’s almost over. Have dinner with me?” She looked so upset about losing this patient that he didn’t think she should be alone tonight. He’d always thought of her as this ice queen, too cold to feel, but seeing her like this made him wonder if maybe his preconceived notions about Lena were entirely wrong.
Lena looked like she might argue, but then she nodded. “Okay. Dinner sounds good.”
“I’ll meet you out front in twenty?”
CHAPTER THREE
AT A FEW minutes after seven, Dex rolled to a stop in front of the main entrance of Metro Memorial to wait for Lena. He bumped the heat up so that it would still be warm inside the car after she’d opened the door. The mid-December day had been crisp and cold. The freezing chill and icy wind that cut straight through a person made him glad he’d sprung for the upgraded package when he’d bought the SUV. Those heated seats were worth every extra penny.
Lena came out the door wearing only scrubs, rubbing her hands briskly up and down her bare arms. Puffs of her breath rose in front of her in the frigid evening air.
What is she doing out in these temperatures without so much as a sweater?
He pulled up right in front of her. Lowering the window slightly, he called over the wind whipping around the buildings and cars, “Hey, Lena, I’m here. Come on, get in out of the cold.”
Hurrying over, Lena climbed inside. “Hi,” she said, her teeth chattering as she shivered.
“Where’s your jacket?” He reached over and turned her heated seat on. “It’s freezing today. You’re going to get hypothermia.”
“I, uh, don’t have one yet.”
He stared at her, unable to speak for a moment while he tried to process her statement. Her eyes were puffy like she’d been crying. He wanted to ask if she was okay, but he didn’t want to overstep. So he decided to focus on the immediate concern she’d presented him with.
“It’s December. What do you mean you don’t have a jacket?”
“It’s my first winter here. I wasn’t sure what the climate would be like. And I didn’t know it was going to go from shorts weather last week to snow flurries almost overnight. Isn’t Tennessee supposed to have four seasons?”
Dex snorted. “Yeah, it does. Winter, pollen, suffocating heat and fall.”
“I missed fall.”
“It was only three days this year. You might have worked through it.”
“Winter wardrobe is on the list for my next day off.” She shrugged as she put her seat belt on. “I never understood why so many cars had heated seats, but now I’m thinking they should be standard equipment.”
“You came from LA, right? Is that where you grew up?”
“Oh, yes. My father runs a hospital now, but he spent years as the most sought-a
fter plastic surgeon for the stars. My mother spends all her time working charity events and fundraising.” Melancholy tinged her soft sigh. “My first boyfriend was a celebrity’s son, and we broke up when he asked me why I didn’t ask my dad to ‘do my tits’ for my birthday because he found mine a little disappointing.”
Hearing the indignation and more than a little hurt in her voice, Dex glanced over to Lena. She had her arms crossed across her middle, unintentionally pushing her chest up. He grunted. “He’s an idiot. I see nothing that would disappoint me. I hope you told him that he should see your dad for a bit of enlargement action of his own because he was the disappointment.”
She chuckled. “There may have been comments along that line. It was our last date.”
“Jessie was my first girlfriend.” The confession tumbled past his lips.
“The ex-fiancée?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“How long were you together?”
“Almost nine years.” And now they’d been apart almost as long.
“Wow.”
Pity permeated that single syllable. The same pity he’d heard in every single condolence after Jessie had disappeared. It had pervaded the looks in people’s eyes and filled conversations that stopped when he walked into the room. His hand clenched around the steering wheel.
Swallowing hard, he gave Lena more details than his brief admission in the OR had provided. “I found out she left the state while I was standing in the church, greeting the guests we had invited to our wedding.”
“She left you at the altar? That’s harsh.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t been in love with Jessie for a long time now. But man, that punch to his pride was hard to get past. “After our rehearsal dinner, I kissed her goodbye. She got into her mother’s car and drove away. Sometime during the night, she disappeared.”
The cracks in their relationship had shown before that fateful night, though. Dex had just been too stubborn to see it. Jessie had struggled with the hours he’d put in during med school and had for some reason convinced herself that he’d be done as soon as he graduated from medical school. They’d fought over his hours a lot—she accused him of being a workaholic, when really he’d passed up surgeries and procedures in an effort to spend more time with her and avoid even more fights. She’d never understood his need to be a doctor, but seemed to like the idea of being a doctor’s wife. He’d thought they’d be okay once he got through his residency. They didn’t make it that far.
“Did she ever tell you why she changed her mind?”
He shook his head. They’d shared a lot of dreams that Jessie had walked away from without a backward glance. The swift way she’d cut all ties to him told him all he’d needed to know about their relationship, or lack thereof, really. After all, a person in love didn’t ghost the person they were in love with, so clearly Jessie hadn’t been in love.
“Nope. I have some assumptions, of course, but we actually haven’t spoken since that day.”
“I can’t imagine spending nearly a decade with someone and walking away like that.”
Dex puffed out a breath. “She doesn’t seem to have looked back. But that’s the past. Can we please discuss something besides how my first love ripped my heart out and tap-danced on it in front of literally every single person that mattered to me?”
Lena seemed to shrink back a bit from the vehemence that leaked into his voice. “So, where is Westville?” she finally asked.
“Westfield,” he corrected, far more gently than he’d spoken to her before. “I’m sorry if I’m snappy about Jessie. Every time I go home, my mom starts trying to pair me up and bore witness to me being left at the altar. That wound is still a little raw.”
“The breakup or the embarrassment over it?”
He didn’t have to think about that answer. “The embarrassment, for sure. Jessie and I would have never lasted, even if we had gotten married that day. The pain of the breakup itself is long gone. I’m not pining for her, if that’s what you are wondering, but the embarrassment just never seems to fade.”
“Gotcha,” she said softly. “So, taking me home with you is about more than blocking a matchmaking attempt. It’s about showing all your old friends and neighbors that you found someone new.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. That was exactly it. Every time he spoke to someone from Westfield outside his family, inevitably they brought up the fact that he’d been left at the altar. It had become a never-ending horror story. “So, Westfield is a few hours’ drive east of here, a small town nestled in the Smoky Mountains. Population about eight hundred.”
“Wow.” Lena snorted. “My graduating class had over nine hundred people. I’m not sure I’ve ever even been to a town that small.”
“City girl,” he said with a teasing tone.
“You have a little accent when you say girl,” she said, poking his arm playfully. “Did you realize?”
A laugh rumbled up from deep in his chest. “Honey, if you think I have an accent now, wait ’til I’m around my family for a few days. All the y’alls and dropped letters will seep back in and I’ll sound like the biggest hick you’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“Don’t call me honey.”
“If you don’t like being called honey, you moved to the wrong state.” He pulled into a parking space in front of a steak house that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at Lena’s scrubs. “Is steak okay? We can go somewhere else if you prefer.”
“Steak’s good.”
He turned the ignition off and hopped out. The concrete walkway glistened with thousands of little ice crystals. Before he’d made it to the front of the SUV, she came up next to him, shivering. He slipped his blazer off and draped in over her shoulders.
“When we get to Westfield, I’m going to need you to sit in the car and wait for me to open your door. My mama raised me to be a gentleman and I’ll catch hell if you don’t let me treat you like a lady. Now, watch your step on this sidewalk, it’s a little icy.”
She raised an eyebrow at him and pulled the blazer closer. “You gave me your jacket. Isn’t that gentlemanly enough?”
Stepping forward to open the restaurant door for her, Dex laughed. “Only someone not raised in the South could say something so naive. According to my mama, a man can never be gentlemanly enough.”
Lena stepped through the door, her eyes twinkling with amusement. “I don’t know if I’m the right fit for you to be bringing home to mama, then.”
He told the host they needed a table for two before turning back to his conversation with Lena. “Why the negative emphasis on ‘mama’?”
“I’ve never heard a grown man call his mother ‘mama’ in conversation like you just did. Most people of my acquaintance would say ‘my mother’ or ‘my mom.’ And I know no one who is grown and still says ‘mama.’”
“Men of your acquaintance. Do you know how prissy that sounds?” He waited while she slid into the booth and then sat across from her. “It’s a Southern thing, I guess. If I call her ‘Mother,’ she’s going to tell me to stop sassing her and maybe box my ears for me.”
Lena held the menu up, her eyes scanning down the list. “If I called mine anything but ‘Mother’ she’d give me a lecture about how my informal attitude could create negative impressions of our family. And nothing upsets Vivienne Franklin more than negative impressions.” She slammed the menu down on the tabletop. “Unless it’s my father creating that negativity. And then she will ignore it as if it never happened.”
“Guessing there’s a history there?”
“My father—” The server came over and Lena cut off her answer midsentence.
After they’d placed their order and were once again alone, Dex prompted her, trying to get her to tell him what she’d meant about her dad. Her actions said there was a story there, one that would be important for him to know.
Anger flashed in her eyes when she looked up at him and confirmed his suspicions. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Frustration welled up within him at her words. They were here because she said they needed to get to know each other. And now she didn’t feel like talking?
“Hmm...” Dex leaned back against the padded back of the booth and stretched his legs out, trying hard to project a calmness he certainly didn’t feel at that moment. “So, what do you want to talk about? Getting to know each other better was your idea, after all.”
“I know. And I’ll tell you about my father before we go to LA, I promise, but for now, can we just start with something lighter? That conversation will simply make me angry, and I don’t want to be angry tonight.”
“One last question and I’ll leave it alone.” He waited until she nodded. “Why do you feel so obligated to go back for this gala? Seems like it would be less stress to just skip it.”
“Family obligations. Now, can I please change the subject? Today has been—” she paused and seemed to roll a few words around before deciding on the right one “—hard. So, we should probably set some guidelines about this, right?”
“Probably. My brother’s wedding is Christmas Eve. It’s been strongly suggested to me that I arrive at least a couple days before and stay through the holiday. How’s that work for you?”
“I’m off from December 19 through January 6. I had the dates put into my contract because I knew I’d never get the holidays off otherwise, and my mother will make life unbearable for me if I don’t attend the gala.”
“And the gala is on New Year’s Eve?”
She nodded. “I think we can both agree that we need to keep the PDA as minimal as we can, stick as close to the truth as feasible, and once we get back from LA this is done. And I think the fewer people at Metro Memorial who know about it, the better. Neither of us needs anyone to think that we are hooking up.”
“Simple enough,” he agreed. “Should we shake on it?”
Wrinkling her nose, she ignored his outstretched hand. “I don’t feel that’s necessary. Less physical contact is probably the best course of action, don’t you think?”
A Nurse, a Surgeon, a Christmas Engagement Page 3