If You Loved Me (26 page)

It seemed as if she'd lived a lifetime since she left last Saturday. "Dave runs a seaplane company out of Prince Rupert. He's a friend of Gray's. Since Gray—after I found Chris, Dave told his pilots to keep an eye out for the boys while they traveled north."

She closed her hand around her glass and lifted her drink to her lips.

"I take it Dave isn't the problem," Alex said mildly. "What is it, Emma?"

She put her glass down. There was no easy way to say the words.

"I can't marry you, Alex."

He leaned forward and took her hand again. "Tell me what's wrong."

"Oh, damn. I wish—you're so damned nice. I wish I could be in love with you."

"Is it this man, the one you flew north to see?"

"I'm sorry, Alex."

"I'm sorry you're hurting." He squeezed her fingers. "And I'm sorry I'm losing a bride. I'm disappointed, not heartbroken. We're still friends, aren't we?"

"Yes, please."

He gave her hand a final reassuring squeeze, then placed her drink back in her fingers. "You're in love with Gray MacKenzie?"

"Yes, but it isn't going to work."

Alex leaned back in his chair, considering her. "How do you know?"

"Oh, Alex, Gray and I—it's an impossible relationship." She swallowed a bitter laugh. "It's all so complicated."

"Complicated?"

She did laugh then. "You sound like a counselor with that gentle challenge in your voice. Gray and I—it always seems to come down to demands and ultimatums, but the real problem is Gray doesn't want to love me. He just... he won't let himself trust me."

Alex's eyes narrowed, as if she were one of his patients and diagnosis was just a thought away. "What about you, Emma? How willing are you to take a chance and trust him?"

* * *

"Dr. Garrett, call O.R. Dr. Garrett, O.R."

"Tomorrow?" the little boy in the hospital bed asked.

Emma smiled at him. "That's right, Teddy. Tomorrow the cast comes off."

"An' I can run?"

Teddy's father tensed and Emma smiled to reassure the father as she bent to touch Teddy's arm. "You can start learning," she said gently. "Remember what I told you?"

He bit his lip. "I gotta exercise and work hard and I've gotta do all the things Ms Charter says and make my leg stronger every day." He gulped. "Yeah. I 'member."

Emma swallowed the lump in her throat. "If you do all that, then one day you'll run. You'll start working on it tomorrow."

"Dr. Garrett, call O.R."

She touched Teddy's arm again. "See you tomorrow, Teddy. We'll take that cast off." Teddy would run. His father was there, smiling and fighting his own tears. Teddy was one of the lucky ones.

His father said, "Thanks, Dr. Garrett," his voice thick with emotion.

Emma left father and son and hurried toward the nurses' station where Sarah Newton was on duty. The nurse smiled at Emma and waved at the telephone bank.

"I knew you were in with Teddy, so I answered your page for you. They're clear in O.R. Ready in ten."

Emma grimaced. "Only an hour late."

She leaned against the counter at the nurses' station while she made a note on Teddy's chart.

"Your brother's here," said Sarah.

Emma jotted the RT order on Teddy's chart, then looked up at Sarah.

"What did you say?"

"Your brother. He's down the hall in the family room."

She put the chart down. Every day it seemed a little harder to keep her mind where it belonged, and a colossal effort to ready herself for surgery. Now she was missing the meaning of words said to her.

"What are you talking about?"

Sarah frowned. "You really haven't been yourself lately."

"I'm fighting off a virus." Maybe it would help to think of Gray MacKenzie's memory as a virus, an illness that would slowly fade as her everyday life fought to overcome the emptiness.

"I hope you're not going to catch that awful flu that's going around. Oh, yeah, your brother said it was urgent."

"You must have the name wrong. He's probably looking for Dr. Parrot. I don't have a brother."

"Well, it's you he wants. Emma, he said." Sarah nodded her head toward the family room down the hall. "Dr. Emma Garrett."

Emma stood erect and Sarah grabbed for the clipboard containing Teddy's chart as it slid off the counter.

"Seven minutes until you're due in O.R.," Sarah reminded her.

"You say this guy's my brother?"

"That's what he said."

It wasn't going to be Gray.

She'd had time to think since she left him, time to feel the years ahead and realize she couldn't let it go this easily. She wasn't ready to give up on him yet. She'd also had time to realize Alex wasn't completely off base when he suggested Gray might not be the only one to blame for the failure of their relationship.

She would have to take the first step, because Gray wasn't going to do it for her. She would have to go to him, and even then he wouldn't make it easy. Somehow, she'd need to find a way through his barriers, but she knew better than to imagine he'd come here looking for her, not after all the things she'd said the last time.

Someone in the family room had claimed to be her brother. Who would use that ruse to locate her in a big hospital?

Sarah gestured behind Emma.

Emma turned, her fingers clenching and unclenching, knowing she'd have to do something about this. Maybe she needed to go see a counselor. Gray was an obsession and she couldn't shake his image from her mind. She'd seen his image in the steam filling her shower. She'd caught a glimpse of him at her mailbox, the turn of his shoulder so familiar the pain bit into her and froze her lungs. Then he'd turned his head and it was a man with Gray's shoulder and a stranger's dark eyes.

She couldn't go on this way. She'd seen him in the coffee room at the office, in the scrub room in the O.R. suite, and now, here in the corridor of the Children's Ortho ward, walking toward her.

She took one step and came up against the counter of the nurses' station, as if she meant to walk through it to get to him. She swallowed, her throat suddenly parched.

"Get moving," Sarah hissed. "I'll call O.R. and tell them you're on your way. You've got five minutes, and if you don't take him he's fair game. I haven't seen a real man in this place in a hell of a long time."

Gray, walking toward her. Really, truly Gray.

Emma got clear of the nurses' station, took two steps, and froze. He stopped in front of her just as someone brushed past in a blur. The walls were high and dizzy, as if she had left out her contact lenses, as if Gray were a fantasy at the center of a surrealistic hospital corridor.

She blinked. His shoulders looked hard and real, covered with the familiar leather jacket. Below his jeans, he wore city shoes, but he still smelled of salt air and the wild, fresh outdoors. He was real. He was standing in front of her in the middle of the hospital corridor outside the surgical ward.

"Hi, Emma." His voice sounded husky.

"Did you..." Oh, God, she was afraid to look into his eyes. She wanted to throw herself into his arms, but she was afraid to do that, too. She cleared her throat. Behind her someone called her name.

"Did I what?" he asked, and her ears distorted his voice, made it sound shaken and soft. She was starving for oxygen, breathing like a woman going into labor.

"Did you come to see me?"

"Yes."

Someone called her name again.

"The operating room. I have to..." Her eyes locked on his, her heart filled with panic and dreams tangled together.

"Emma—"

She answered but there was no sound.

"Remember back in Farley Bay? We were just kids, but when you offered to come away with me—" A muscle jerked and the air went out of his lungs as if he had been holding it to the point of explosion. "I was scared you wouldn't come, and at the same time I was terrified you would."

She swallowed twice, heard Sarah calling, "Emma, surgery says they've got the four year old with the broken forearm ready to go!"

"I have to go." She wanted to reach out, to touch him. If she left now, he might go away. He might never come back.

"I'll wait. How long?"

"Half an hour?"

"Where?"

"The cafeteria. It's not very..."

"I'll be there."

"Dr. Garrett?" said a voice behind her.

She tore her eyes free and found Sarah close and curious. They'd shared lunches and a few long vigils over children damaged almost beyond repair. Emma had never shared her feelings about Gray with Sarah, not with anyone except Gray and Alex.

Sarah looked as if she knew, as if Emma's heart were written on her face.

"Sarah, could you show Mr. MacKenzie how to find the cafeteria?"

"Sure. You'll be sorry, though," she warned Gray. "Rotten food, and the place is filled with doctors, nurses, and sick people. Come on, this way."

Emma felt Gray's eyes on her back as she hurried away. Scared, he'd said. Scared she would come with him, scared she wouldn't.

She was always walking away from him, always feeling it was Gray leaving because he sent her away. She would never forget the time a younger Gray had demanded she not see him again unless she was willing to have him come to her front door, demanded she live with him, come away with him without looking back. He had always demanded more than she could give, had always watched her with that look in his eyes, knowing she'd pull back.

If she'd gone with him back then...

That was the past. This was another Gray. Another Emma. They were both older. This was a new chance.

She wasn't as foolish as she'd been when she'd flown into Paul's arms to bury her hurt.

* * *

The boy lying on the stretcher outside the operating room was crying as the scrub nurse spoke softly to him.

"It hurts," the child whimpered, his eyes swollen, cheeks stained with tear tracks.

"Dr. Garrett is going to make it better," promised the nurse. Her eyes lifted to Emma. "X rays aren't down yet," she said quietly.

Emma touched the boy's good arm. She'd learned long ago that touching helped. "We'll stop the pain in no time, Andrew." The nurse murmured she'd given an injection ten minutes ago. His pain was partly from fear and partly from the residual pain in his arm. It didn't help anything that the surgery schedule had been put back an hour by a series of complications in earlier cases. "We'll put a good strong cast on it," Emma promised.

As she'd hoped, the boy brightened slightly at the notion of a big cast to wear. "Nurse Ellis will draw a funny picture on the cast," Emma promised before she went to scrub.

The delays weren't over. X-ray had dispatched the films to O.R., but after a ten-minute wait, they turned up on the desk of the medical ward in the next wing. Andrew was in the operating room, but surgery couldn't start until Emma had the X-rays. Little Andrew started crying again and Emma sighed with relief when the nurse whispered, "X-rays are here."

Emma nodded to the anesthetist, who administered the medication as he talked softly to the boy.

Gray was downstairs in the cafeteria. Half an hour, she'd said, but that time was almost gone. Emma sucked in a deep breath and turned to look at the X-rays, knowing nothing must touch her mind now except the child's arm.

Gray would have to wait. This child needed her.

It was over an hour before she got away from the operating suite and into her street clothes. She wrote up the post-op orders for Andrew and rushed to the elevators. Both were occupied, indicators showing them tied up in the subbasement.

She took the service stairs.

Half an hour. He'd said he would wait, but for all she knew he'd just stopped between planes.

Oh, God, please don't let him leave!

She saw him as she came through the doors to the cafeteria. Someone called her name and she moved her hand in a gesture to push away everything but the man at the other end of the long room. She stopped for an old man pushing his intravenous pole. From a table beside her, one of the surgeons called to her.

"Emma, I've got a conflict with that list for next Thursday."

Gray had seen her. She tried to stop the shaking inside. This was like surgery, too important to let her emotions get in the way. She'd said a lot of words the last time they were together, too many words.

A group of student nurses clustered around the table behind Gray. She knew they would be watching him, wondering who he was, because he seemed too handsome, too vital for the daily tangle of emotions played out here in the hospital cafeteria.

Emma gripped the back of a chair and stared across the table at him. She knew she should say something, but she didn't know what.

"Shall we go?" he asked, although he didn't stand up. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't frowning, either. His face was like granite, and she realized that the rigid muscles of his jaw were a signal he had a lot hidden inside.

She sat down before her legs gave way.

"Do you want coffee?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, then, "I don't know."

He stood up. She turned and watched him walk away from her toward the cafeteria line. She jerked herself back around and stared at the place where he'd been sitting. Why had he come?

She could hear the whispers from the table of student nurses. Tomorrow the whole hospital would be talking about Dr. Emma Garrett and the man she'd sat with in the cafeteria.

"I wouldn't mind," breathed the most vocal of the students.

"A hunk," agreed the other. "Doctors get all the luck. It's not fair."

Gray put a steaming mug down in front of her. "I hope you don't drink much of this stuff It's bloody awful."

She curled her hands around the hot cup as he sat across from her. He looked a little less like a rock, almost as if he might smile if she could get her own lips to curve. His gaze flickered from the coffee to her face.

"You were limping when you came into the cafeteria."

"Stress." She had believed her heart would be in her face and had known there was nothing she could change. She hadn't known she was limping or she would have walked more slowly. "Gray, I—"