After they got out of the elevator on the pediatric clinic floor, they used the back entrance to reach Sam’s office. Surprisingly, Sam was sitting at his desk.
He looked up and grinned. “My two favorite people!” he said diplomatically. Andrea knew, hands down, if it came to making a choice Dani would win, but it felt good to be included in Sam’s world. With each kiss they seemed to be getting closer to crossing the line to making love. She wondered how that would change the dynamic, between not only her and Sam but her and Dani.
Dani rushed to his dad for a hug and the sight released bubble-like warmth in her chest, all floaty and happy feeling. Sam stood. “How’d the fitting go?”
“I only needed to make tiny adjustments and polish the acrylic. Things are going great. I should be finished with his prosthetic by next week, and after another week we’ll replace this one for the real thing.” She grinned at Dani. “Then you won’t have to wear the patch anymore. Yay.”
Dani clapped. After smiling at her tiny patient, her gaze drifted toward Sam. He must have really liked what she’d said because he bore a look that mixed practical appreciation with nothing less than smoldering desire. What a combo! It set off a sparkling cascade across her shoulders and breasts, and she knew for a fact her peaked breasts pointed against the thin material of her blouse. It didn’t go unnoticed. He stepped toward her, put his hand behind her neck and gently brought her within kissing range. His eyes flickered with pure desire just before their lips met.
It may have been a clinical office kiss but, wow, it thrummed right through her center straight down to her nearly curling toes. There they lingered on the outskirts of heaven until Dani tugged on both of their slacks and put a swift end to the moment, but not before Andrea saw a promise for much, much more...later. And she was definitely ready for that next step. Had been almost since the first night they’d kissed. Sam was a man she wanted to know completely, big scary doctor or not.
“I just finished my last appointment...” There was that post-kiss huskiness in his voice she’d come to love.
“Dr. Sammy!” A nurse appeared at his door. “There’s a little girl having an acute asthma attack in the waiting room.”
He instantly snapped out of their promising romantic moment. “Bring her to my exam room.”
Andrea stepped aside and gathered Dani to her legs as “Dr. Sammy” strode out the door.
* * *
Down the hall, another nurse rushed in, with a panic-stricken mother following behind holding a limp child with her head on her mother’s shoulder. “The urgent care triage nurse said she didn’t hear any wheezing, so I left, but this happened before we got to the car.”
Sam knew that wasn’t always a good sign. The urgent care nurse may have heard a “quiet chest” but for all the wrong reasons. If the child had been suffering from a prolonged asthma attack, it may have turned into status asthmaticus, where the lungs had shut down, which could lead to imminent respiratory failure and, if not treated, cardiac arrest.
He strode to the exam room and saw a cyanotic toddler being propped up in a sitting position by her mother. The little girl used the accessory muscles of her upper chest, trying to breathe. When he had the mother remove the child’s shirt, retraction was obvious between her ribs. The child was in acute respiratory distress. He instructed his nurse to measure the pulse oximetry, then put oxygen on the patient immediately.
“Mom, has she had a virus recently?” He pulled out his stethoscope, preparing to listen to the child’s lungs. “Had to use inhalers more often? Been treated with steroids lately?”
“Yes,” the stressed mother said, sounding as breathy as her child. “Last week. I knew I had to bring her to you, Dr. Marcus, but your appointments were full.”
He shook his head, wishing for more time in the day and more appointment slots for kids like this, but also in disappointment over the UC triage missing the bigger picture than lungs without noticeable wheezing. They were supposed to be the safety net for situations like these, but today they’d let a patient and her mother down.
The pulse oximeter indicated a hypoxic patient with a loud alarm. Sam sighed at the reading. “Get a mask on her at eight liters. Start a line,” he said to his nurse Leslie. “I’m going to give her a pop of adrenaline. Mom, how much does she weigh?”
The mother told him and he made quick mental calculations and drew up the drug, hoping to buy time before they set up a nebulizer treatment. He delivered the intramuscular injection, then stuck his head out of the examination room door. “Sharon? We need more hands in here.” From the corner of his eye, he saw movement and turned toward Andrea and Dani. Concern covered her face.
“I’m going to take Dani home with me,” she said, her brow furrowed.
He gave a grateful nod, trying to offer reassurance, but honestly he hadn’t a clue how things would turn out for the little girl. “I’ll come later as soon as I can. Thanks.”
They left the department just before the tiny asthmatic took another step for the worse.
“Let’s nebulize some adrenaline, try to open her up, then start the bronchodilator—oh, and add some ipratropium bromide, too.” Why did he have the feeling he was running a precode? He studied the limp child. “Got that line in yet, Leslie?” His major hope was that her veins hadn’t collapsed.
The nurse had just finished opening the tubing and the fluid flowed into the vein in the child’s antecubital fossa. “Let’s titrate terbutaline.” He did quick mental math for kilograms of weight, then gave the amount for the piggyback to the IV. “Call the pharmacy, tell them we need methylprednisolone IV for a thirty-five-pound child, stat.
“Sharon, have someone call Respiratory, get someone up here pronto for blood gases.” So far none of their efforts had increased the child’s O2 sat, and if things continued on this trajectory they might soon be dealing with a code blue. “We’ll keep the respiratory therapist around in case we need to intubate.”
And so it went...
* * *
Andrea drove Dani slowly to her house, worried about not having a car seat for him and making him sit in the backseat of her car with the seat belt buckled tight. What would Sam have done if she hadn’t been there? That wasn’t all she worried about. Every time she’d seen him over the past three weeks, with each kiss she’d felt herself slip closer and closer to falling for him. Just now, seeing Sam spring into action like a hero for a child in need helped her understand how dedicated he was to his profession.
It also helped her put her own situation into perspective. Seeing his unwavering commitment forced her to take a good long look at herself, and how unsure she still was about her own professional path. She seemed to be standing with one foot in ancillary medicine and the other in the creative arts. And the truth was she loved both! Straddling the line hadn’t paid off with her painting, she hadn’t completed a picture in months, and it kept her anxious and unsatisfied when she worked her forty hours a week in the O&A department. She should never have agreed to add that extra day.
Add in starting to fall for a guy with a demanding job and an adorable kid who needed attention, and she nearly panicked, feeling completely out of control of her own situation. How had she let this happen? Sam had a way of taking over, just like her father, even when it wasn’t obvious. Was that how it had all started with her mother? Little by little, because her mother hadn’t figured out where she wanted to be in life, Jerome had taken over until there seemed nothing left of her mother. Until she’d practically disappeared!
Could the same happen to her?
“I’m hungry,” Dani said from the backseat.
Thank goodness he’d broken her negative train of thought. “Want a hamburger?”
He clapped. “Yes!”
At least some decisions were still easy to make.
* * *
Fortunately, Cat
had delivered Dani’s day bag with him when she’d brought him by that afternoon. Andrea found pajamas and a pair of clean underpants plus some kids’ books inside and so much more. Even Ribbit, the stuffed frog she’d given him. She’d been able to bathe him and read a book that apparently was his favorite, Goodnight California.
The author used the Goodnight Moon setup to say good-night in travelogue style to all the beautiful places in the state. Dani sat rapt, holding Ribbit, snuggled under her arm on the sofa, listening to every word as if he’d never heard them before, and pointing to his favorite pictures. The redwoods, Yosemite, the beach. Ah, the beach probably reminded him of home in the Philippines. She wondered if Sam had taken Dani to the beach yet.
Dani’s day bag even had a toothbrush, so after one last glass of milk, where Andrea opened up Dani’s world to the graham cracker experience of dipping them into the milk, she brushed his teeth and put him to bed, along with Ribbit, in her studio, which had a daybed and trundle bed combo left over from her childhood. Nowadays she used it to flounce onto when she needed to think about what she’d just painted and where to go next, or, as was often the case, to nap on when she’d painted so long she couldn’t even bring herself to walk down the hall to her own room. When she’d been a girl, before her mother had gotten really depressed and hadn’t allowed her to have friends over, her sleepover guests had got the trundle bed section, and she felt Dani, who had special toddler bed rails at home, would be safe there.
She kissed him good-night and started to tiptoe out of the room.
“Do I live here now?” he asked, just before she shut the door, having left a night-light on in the far corner.
Was that how orphans thought? “No, honey. You’re just visiting, like when you go to Aunt Cat’s house. Your daddy will come and get you later. But he needed to save a little girl at the hospital first.”
“Okay.”
It struck like a baseball bat how similar her explanation was to what her mother’s used to be on countless nights when her father hadn’t made it home in time for dinner or to kiss her good-night. The tender feelings she carried for Dani puffed up and made her eyes prickle.
It was scary to care so much for a little person.
Within a couple of hours of putting Dani to bed, a quiet knock on her door drew her from the art magazine she’d been reading in her living room. She opened the small peephole on the door. It was Sam, looking exactly the way a guy should after having a long, stressful day where lives had been at stake and family responsibilities had had to be put on the back burner. There was a combination of fatigue, guilt and gratefulness she read in his powerful blue gaze.
She invited him in with a quick kiss, pointed to the nearest chair with an ottoman for his feet and offered him a drink of his choice.
“Seems like the perfect time for that rain check on the wine,” he said. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and the sight of his throat looked sexy as hell. But, then, she found every little thing about Sam Marcus sexy, she may as well admit it. And she loved the way they’d made an ongoing gag about every glass of wine they shared being a rain check.
“Red or white?”
He closed his eyes on a slow inhalation, as if making one more decision was beyond his grasp, so she solved his problem.
“I’ve got a fabulous triple red wine open. How does that sound?”
Again, that grateful blue gaze, standing out all the more thanks to the after-five stubble on his cheeks and chin, nearly bowled her over. She turned to fetch the wine when a thought occurred to her. “Have you eaten?”
“No.” He didn’t need to think long about that.
“I told you I don’t cook but I can make a pretty good omelet. Would that work?”
“Sounds perfect.”
She understood he could probably eat cardboard if he had to by now, as it was almost ten.
“Dani in bed?”
“Yes,” she said, as she got down two wineglasses and reached for the bottle on the counter. “Fell right to sleep in my old trundle bed. What a sweetheart he is.”
“Okay if I take a peek?”
It was his kid, why did he need to ask? “You’re not seriously asking me permission, are you?”
She imagined that Sam Marcus smile she’d come to know and adore spreading across his boyish but all-male face as she poured the wine and he padded down the hall. “Which door?” he asked with a loud whisper.
“First one on the left.” She put his glass on the kitchen table and got busy gathering the things she’d need to make her one good dish. Sad but true, her cooking skills didn’t go beyond sandwiches and eggs. But she was determined to make the best damn omelet of her life for Sam. She took a quick sip of liquid confidence from the wineglass and went to work.
After a couple of minutes Sam stepped into the kitchen, standing right behind her as she whipped the eggs. He put his hands on her hips, bent and kissed the back of her neck. She nearly dropped the whisk, it felt so heavenly. One touch from Sam. One kiss in the perfect spot, and she was covered in tingles. She stopped what she was doing, leaned back, giving him full access to the side of her neck, and enjoyed every second of this gift as he gently nuzzled and kissed her.
“Thank you,” he whispered over the shell of her ear.
More sensations fanned across her scalp, down her neck and over her chest. “Anytime.” Whoops, had she just given him permission to leave Dani with her anytime? “I should get this omelet going before you starve to death. Oh, and your wine’s on the table.”
He let go of her hips and stepped away, and she had dueling thoughts. She was either nuts to let him stop or smart not to let him take advantage of her right there in the kitchen. She took another sip of wine. Yeah, she was probably nuts.
“Good wine,” he said.
“I thought you’d like it. How’s the little girl?” Listen to them, a regular couple discussing the day and the kids. The thought almost made her smile, but the subject of the little girl fighting for her life kept Andrea serious.
A kitchen chair skidded along the tile as he pulled it out and sat, then took another drink and propped his feet on an adjacent chair. “She’s alive, but not in great shape.”
Something in Andrea’s chest withered with the news as she heated the skillet and oil and when it reached the perfect temperature she poured in the eggs, listening to every word Sam said, giving him time to share as much or as little as he cared to.
“She coded shortly after you left. We intubated her, got her to the ICU in time for a second code.” He sighed, and she glanced over her shoulder and saw him rub his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “She’s on a ventilator right now, and hopefully the drugs will kick in tonight so we can get her off it as soon as possible.”
“Oh, the poor baby.” Andrea’s insides twisted over the thought of a child fighting for her life. “If her mother hadn’t brought her to you, she might be dead.”
He nodded deeply and took another drink of wine.
“You look beat. Why don’t you go make yourself comfortable on the couch, put your feet up, and I’ll bring your dinner as soon as it’s done.”
He didn’t argue, just took his wineglass and left the room. “Good idea.”
She flipped the omelet, added grated cheese to the lightly browned side, waited a minute or two for the toast to pop and the eggs to set, then folded the omelet in half and put everything on a plate, then walked to the living room to find Sam asleep on her couch, her everyday hero breathing deep, peaceful breaths that did more for her libido than those butterfly kisses on her neck a few moments ago.
His long, sturdy legs stretched the length of her sofa. He’d kicked off his shoes, his sock-covered feet crossed at the ankles, arms folded over his trim middle, head tilted chin to chest. All he needed was a cowboy hat to complete the picture. He was a fine-looking man,
and she could hardly believe he kept coming round. A quick fantasy of crawling like a cat over him and kissing the lips she’d come to long for started a deep yearning to be skin to skin with him. What would it be like?
Truth was she hadn’t wanted a man this much since college. The complete opposite of the artsy fellow students she’d dated back then, Sam managed to turn her on wearing, as it happened today, a gray business suit. He hadn’t bothered to take off the jacket, so she had to settle for looking at his naked throat and the top of his white undershirt as he slept. Gimme, gimme.
She glanced at the plate, steam rising from the best omelet she’d ever concocted especially for Sam, sighed, then took a bite to prove it really was as light and fluffy as it looked. She savored the egg and Cheddar cheese taste and the sight of the man she’d fallen head over heels for in record time passed out from exhaustion on her couch, then made a snap decision.
Tonight was the night.
She tiptoed to the kitchen, found a notepad and scribbled Sam an invitation. Then, making sure to leave one light on so he’d see it, she propped the note against his wineglass.
If you want to stay over, I’m keeping the bed warm for you. My room is at the end of the hall.
CHAPTER FIVE
SAM WOKE UP, a crick in his neck from the awkward position in which he’d fallen asleep on the not-so-soft modern couch. It took a moment to realize where he was. Andrea’s cozy triplex apartment. He scrubbed his face to help him wake up. Dani was asleep in her guest bed. Right. No way would he disturb his son at this hour.
He took out his phone and scrolled with blurry vision for any messages from the hospital. He’d signed off with the on-call ICU doc and knew they’d only call with extremely bad news, so he gave a sigh of relief over the lack of “missed call” notices, texts or email.
In the dim light, his gaze drifted to the uneaten omelet on the glass coffee table. It touched him, knowing Andrea was a devout non-cook yet she’d offered to make the one thing she could, especially for him. He felt bad he’d fallen asleep before he could enjoy the fruit of her efforts.
A Mother for His Adopted Son Page 7