Luca's Bad Girl (8 page)

One thing she knew for sure was that Luca wasn’t like any other man she’d known. In a brief time he’d got firmly under her skin and she wasn’t about to lose the upper hand to him.

There wouldn’t be a next time. Certainly not a party.

Luca’s wicked chuckle mocked her as she turned the handle and slipped out of the apartment.

Evie bustled through the deserted outpatients department at seven o’clock the next evening. She’d begged a chart from Enid Kenny, the NUM of the department earlier, who’d relinquished it only after Evie had promised faithfully to personally return it before she left for the day.

Someone else might have sent a courier but not Evie. Sister Enid Kenny was an institution around The Harbour and not to be messed with! Hence the sweet note and box of chocolates she was also clutching in her hand.

She turned right, passing a row of examination rooms
on her way to Enid’s office. She noticed a light on in the far office. Voices floated out. Male voices. She frowned. Who on earth was working this late?

Then, to her utter surprise, Finn stepped out, followed by Rupert Davidson. Evie faltered and dived into the nearest exam room. Recovering quickly, she cautiously peeked around the door. In the empty department their voices carried easily and she eavesdropped unashamedly.

She watched as they shook hands and Rupert said, ‘You’re entitled to a second opinion, Finn. But you know as well as I do that the conservative approach is only a sticky plaster and you can’t keep going on like this. Surgery will have to happen at some stage.’

Then Finn nodded but even from a few metres away she could see that familiar set to his unshaven jaw. ‘Thanks, Rupert. I’ll think about it.’

And then he turned and walked away in the opposite direction.

Evie fell back against the wall of the examination room, her heart pounding. What the hell had that been about? She grappled with what she’d heard and seen, trying to make sense of it.

Finn was seeing Rupert? A neurologist?
You can’t keep going on like this.
Was there something wrong?

She recalled the uneasy feelings she’d had for a while now that something was up with Finn, and the rumours that he’d been wounded on a tour in Afghanistan when he’d been in the army. Had he sustained injuries during his time there? Injuries that could affect his job?

Eric Frobisher, SHH’s officious medical director, would be furious if that was the case. He and Finn already butted heads on a regular basis.

Evie drummed her fingers against the chart as curiosity and concern for Finn warred within her. She told herself it was pure collegial interest. One doctor looking out for another. Even if said doctor was the most surly and unappreciative man she’d ever met.

Making a decision, Evie waited for a couple of minutes before pushing herself off the wall and heading towards her original destination. She stopped in mid-stride as she passed the last office and blinked at Rupert with what she hoped was her very best round-eyed surprise.

‘Rupert?’ she asked. ‘What are you still doing here? Burning the candle at both ends?’

Rupert, who was writing in a chart, laughed as he put down his pen. ‘No such luck. Just a late appointment.’

Evie nodded, glancing at the chart trying to see a name. ‘Gosh, that’s dedication.’ She smiled.

Rupert shrugged. ‘It was a favour.’ He nodded at the package in her hand. ‘What about you? Those chocolates for me?’

She laughed. ‘Oh, no, these are major sucking-up chocolates for Enid.’

Rupert laughed back. ‘You’re coming to Luca’s party in a couple of weeks?’ she asked.

Rupert nodded. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

‘Great,’ she said as she backed out the door, her head still swimming with what she’d just witnessed.

What in the hell was wrong with Finn Kennedy?

CHAPTER FIVE

T
WO
weeks later Mia was watching the clock, thinking that for once in her working life she might actually get off on time. Her shift, one of those rare short shifts, was due to finish at two and things were looking good. With Evie going off to Luca’s party tonight—the one she was
not
going to attend, no matter how much Evie begged—she had a quiet night of reading planned.

The latest blockbuster novel had been sitting on her bedside table, gathering dust, for too long.

She glanced nervously over at the man in question as he spoke on the phone at the other end of the central monitoring station. She’d managed to keep her attraction at bay this past fortnight—until last night. A cluttered, semi-dark storeroom had seriously tried her resolve to keep away when they’d both ended up inside. His body had been big and close, his lips had kicked up into a frank smile, his gaze firmly fixed on her mouth.

How she hadn’t pushed him against the wall and ravaged him she still wasn’t sure.

But she hadn’t. She’d caught herself at the last second. Remembered that she’d already broken her golden rule once and she wasn’t going to do it again. Even if
he was the most skilled, most exciting lover she’d ever known.

Unfortunately, the buzz from last night’s near kiss was still vibrating through her system and they’d been trading furtive glances all morning. He’d looked at her with undiluted lust half an hour ago and she still could barely see straight.

His gaze met hers again, his brown eyes knowing, and her pulse picked up a notch.

‘Ambulance two minutes out.’

The urgent note in Nola’s voice dragged her attention back to reality and Mia looked down to where the efficient triage nurse sat, the red emergency phone to her ear, speaking out loud as she wrote the details down from the ambulance coms centre.

‘Thirty-year-old male. Jumper. Two storeys. Bilateral comminuted fractured tib and fibs, right compound fractured femur, query fractured pelvis, query spinal injuries, fractured right ribs, GCS twelve, major internal injuries, query ruptured spleen, hypotensive and tachycardic.’

Luca joined them, all business now as he read the details again over Nola’s shoulder.

‘I’ll page Ortho and General Surgery,’ Mia said, grabbing the phone nearest her as the distant wail of a siren permeated the thick walls of the hospital.

Luca also picked up a phone. ‘I’ll alert blood bank that we might need to initiate the massive transfusion protocol.’

By the time the ambulance pulled up a minute later, everything was prepped and Luca and Mia were standing outside, ready to receive the patient.

Luca grabbed the ambulance doorhandle and pulled
it open as the paramedic driving the vehicle joined them, launching into a rapid-fire handover of injuries, actual and suspected.

He and the treating paramedic pulled the gurney out of the back of the ambulance. The patient was moaning, his face covered by an oxygen mask.

‘Pupils equal and reacting,’ the paramedica continued as they pushed the gurney towards the entrance, Mia and Luca keeping pace. ‘BP ninety over sixty, pulse one hundred and forty, resps fifty and shallow. Right chest tube inserted on scene, two IV cannulae wide open.’

‘Do we know what happened?’ Mia asked, clinging to the gurney rail as they practically flew inside to the prepared trauma cubicle.

‘Paternity test showed he wasn’t the baby’s daddy,’ the paramedic stated dispassionately.

Mia felt a prickle up her spine as she and Luca shared a look. ‘Is his name Stan?’ she asked.

The paramedic nodded. ‘Stanley James.’

Repeat customers—especially suicides attempts—were reasonably common in the department. As were frequent-flyer drug addicts and patients with chronic conditions. Mia treated them all with courtesy and professionalism, careful not to get emotionally invested in them.

But this man had held her at knifepoint. Had yanked her back into the convoluted emotions of her childhood. Had been the catalyst for what had happened later that night with Luca.

Mia felt sick as two nurses descended and between the four of them they quickly transferred Stan to the
hospital gurney on the count of three. Whether she liked it or not, she and Stanley were connected.

And she really didn’t want to have to deal with that.

Stan pulled his mask off and grabbed her hand. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I told you she was cheating on me.’

Mia looked into his anguished face, trying not to see her father, trying only to see the man who had menaced her with a knife. But he looked … broken.

Just like her father.

‘It’s going to be okay, Stan,’ she murmured, replacing his mask as people bustled around her. ‘We’re going to get you patched up.’

He pulled it off again. ‘No. Just leave me. Just leave me to die.’

Mia and Luca’s gazes met for a moment. She felt rage build inside as she looked back down at Stan. He’d taken the coward’s way out, just like her father. Her father had walked, Stan had jumped—both ways showed very little regard for the people left behind.

For a tiny baby. For a bewildered ten-year-old girl.

‘Please, just let me die,’ Stan begged.

Mia bit down on the urge to tell Stan that if he’d really wanted to die he should have jumped from a higher building. The fact that he hadn’t spoke volumes about the incident. She doubted it was a true attempt—more like a cry for help.

And she was damned if she was going to let him die on her watch.

She put the mask back. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid, Stan.’

‘We need X-Ray,’ Luca said. ‘And get Psych down here. I want to consult with John Allen.’

Luca and Mia, their personal situation forgotten,
worked methodically over the next hour to stabilise Stan for Theatre. They intubated, placed lines and another chest tube, gave blood and plasma expanders, consulted with Ortho, General Surgery and Radiology.

And all the time Luca was chanting,
Come on, Stan, come on Stan, come on Stan. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.
If it took everything he had, Luca was not going to let this man die.

Not that he’d ever been particularly emotional about life-and-death situations. Being a trauma specialist, he saw the struggle between the two on a regular basis. Like two powerfully competing forces pulling in opposite directions. He worked hard to save every patient but not even he was arrogant enough to assume that hard work was always enough.

Sometimes, no matter what he threw at a patient, they died.

He got that. People died.

Children, teenagers, athletes, mothers, forty-year-olds with everything to live for.

People died.

Hell … they were all dying.

But the truth was, Stan had struck a chord. And probably for the first time ever he actually felt personally invested in a patient. And not because Stan had threatened him with a knife but because Luca knew all about the demons that had driven him.

He knew how it felt to be betrayed by the person you loved. How it felt to have your whole world yanked out from under you. And how life-changing that could be.

He knew how it felt to be a father one moment and then suddenly not.

To feel powerless.

To feel alone.

It may have been a whole bunch of years ago but some things never left you.

He glanced at Mia as she took a phone call from the lab. Mia, who was working just as hard to pull Stan through. The man who had threatened to stab her, who had slashed her arm with a knife.

What was driving her?

The same things that had driven her to cry out in her sleep that night? That had spurred her to seek amnesia in his arms?

What were the things that haunted her? That made her tough and feisty and not the
cuddling
type?

Had Stan stirred them up for her as he had stirred things up from
his
past?
Daddy, come back
. That’s what she’d cried out that night. Did Stan remind her of her father as he had reminded him of his sixteen-year-old self?

‘Haemoglobin’s eight,’ Mia announced. She ordered another bag of blood to be hung and administered stat. ‘Let’s get him to Theatre for that laparotomy,’ she said. ‘He’s bleeding from somewhere.’

As if by magic, an anaesthetist, a nurse and two orderlies arrived and Luca dragged himself out of his reverie to help with the handover.

Within ten minutes Stan had been whisked away and the two of them stood in an empty trauma bay. The floor was littered with packaging and discarded dressing material that had fallen short of the bin. And where there’d been frantic activity and the beeps and alarms of monitors seconds ago, there was now absolute quiet.

Luca glanced at Mia watching Stan disappear down
the corridor with a look on her face he couldn’t quite work out.

He put his arm around her shoulder. ‘He’ll be okay,’ he said, even though he had no earthly idea why he’d said it and absolutely no way of knowing how true it was.

Mia nodded. Physically, sure … maybe. After an extended recovery period and if they could control the bleeding and get him through about a hundred complications that could arise.

But mentally?

Would Stan ever be the same again? Was her father?

For a few insane seconds she leaned into the hug, soaking up the comfort, surprised to find that she needed it as a block of unexpected emotion lodged in her chest, invading her throat, threatening to choke her.

And she hated it.

She pulled away, stripped off her plastic gown and peeled off her gloves, disposing of them in an overflowing bin.

‘I’ll follow up with John,’ she said.

And left Luca behind in the bay.

Later that evening, Mia accompanied Evie to the party. She’d finally caved to her friend’s relentless insistence that she go. Stan’s case had been playing on her mind all afternoon and she knew she wouldn’t be able to settle to a book. She needed a distraction and there was no doubt Luca distracted the hell out of her.

That brief comforting hug had been playing on her mind too but she pushed it aside. The distraction she needed from Luca did not involve anything as nurturing
as comfort. She needed hard and ready. Hot and sweaty. Down and dirty.

And since she knew he gave it better than anyone else—could obliterate everything else from her brain—only he would do.