Taking Jana (Paradise South #2) (2 page)

The child dozed for the minutes that felt like years before a CFS agent finally entered the ER. God, literally a minute before the
ten-minute
mark set by Dr. Pierce. Jana patted the child’s hand.

“I want my dad here. Where is my daddy?”

Jana looked up at the doctor. Jesus Christ, this poor kid. She felt her jaw clench, but consciously willed its release, mustering all the calm and cathartic energy she could to infuse into the girl through her silent gaze.

“I’ll get the
sign-off
,” Dr. Henry Pierce told Jana while she kept constant eye contact with Ashley, not breaking it with so much as a blink.

Jana had been told what a natural she was, but she knew she had a special connection with children in particular. She began to hum something her grandfather had sung to her when she was small; a sweet Spanish lullaby. And Ashley stared as if hypnotized. Beyond the pumping pain meds and the child’s large loss of blood from the metal shrapnel still embedded in her shin, the melody had a calming effect, or at least, Jana liked to think so.

Dr. Pierce came back a few moments later and whispered to Jana, “I got the signature. Go ahead and explain. We have”—his eyes glanced up at the wall clock—“half a minute.”

Jana swallowed down the returning knot in her throat. This part was where Luly would have gotten sick. A child. A now fatherless, parentless child was about to lose a limb. But Jana, having no children of her own, felt this was no less heart crushing. It was that no one else
in-unit
had the balls to do it, or had the heart to do it right.

“Ashley, sweetheart, you have a really bad broken leg. And your daddy made us promise to get you
one-hundred
percent fixed, no matter what, because he loves you more than anything in the entire world. He can’t be here right now, but a promise is a promise.”

“I want my daddy.”

“I know, sweetie. But only medical people are allowed in here right now. So, listen, Ashley, the cut in your leg is infected, and that bad infection can go through your body if we don’t stop it now. Do you understand so far?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Jana took the girl’s little hand in hers. “So we need to cut the part below your knee off and then replace it with a stronger leg, like a superhuman one.”

The child’s brows furrowed, eyes glazed and shifting as if unbelieving her ears.

“If we don’t do this right now, the infection will spread. And we can’t break our promise to your daddy.”

The child closed her eyes. Large tears formed and then fell onto the wrinkled white sheets beneath her small body. An echo of pitter pat, pitter pat dictated Jana’s own breath, hitching and waiting until the next teardrop approved a next inhale.

“Will it hurt?” the child asked through her little gasps.

Jana’s teeth clenched, gnashing and gritting against each other as if that alone could help hold back her own threatening tear drops.

When the doctor nodded, Jana stood up, regaining her composure just like that. She smiled softly. “You’ll be asleep, and when you wake up it will be sore for a time, but after that, no. It’ll feel a little weird, but you will learn to walk and run again,” she explained while the team set up anesthesia and got the gurney ready to head to surgery.

“Okay…I’ll do it for Daddy, and he can help me learn how to use my new leg…because he is super…human…good at everyth…thing…” The child’s hopeful voice trailed off, her eyelids falling as fast as Jana’s heart, knowing the child would wake from surgery to a missing limb and a missing parent. Her father. Her everything.

*

Mouth gaping and silent for once, her heavily
made-up
eyes narrowed, Jocelyn Carlson sat facing Antonio when he turned around to face her. She was straddling her date
mid-coitus
, bare breasts displayed proudly, each topped by deep rose nipples, sharp, hard, like the sinstress’s glare.

His glare met hers. “Please get dressed and get out of my limousine, or kindly refrain from placing your shoes or feet against my seats. And,” he added,
hyper-conscious
of his
mellow-yet
-deadly sincere tone, “this privacy window stays up. Please choose now, before I continue driving.” His voice had maintained that intended calm but was peppered with sharp darts of anger, almost out of his control. And it competed with nothing but the heavy panting from the man beneath Ms. Carlson and her exaggerating huffing from her flaring nostrils.

But it was his nostrils that burned, and his head too, as a wave of her perfume hit him and made him want to vomit. It was Michelle’s scent, one and the same.

“I have never—”

“Choose,” Antonio repeated, cutting her off while the pornographic scene filling his frame didn’t faze him at all, but he was sure Jocelyn Carlson wished it did. She probably wanted his cock engorged and begging to get out, begging to get into her, begging to fill the insecure empty shell of a woman. But the exact opposite was the case. His entire body’s blood flow was monopolized by his heated face and jackhammering heart pumping out his rage. The woman more than repulsed him. She was the epitome of pathetic, and made his manhood soft and his stomach sick.

The escort broke the silence. “I’ve lost it, babe—”

“Jason—”

“Rob. It’s Rob.”

“Whatever. Don’t you move a goddamn limb, Rob.”

“Yeah, I’m done.” Her date pushed her off him, and Jocelyn Carlson landed on the seat with a creaky thud against the leather upholstery. She grumbled while reaching for her dress down around her ankles.

Her date slid forward to talk directly to Antonio. “Sorry man, you know, about all this. Can you just drop me at the closest titty bar? I know we’re in the strip club district.”

“You fucking little shit,” the woman spat while Antonio turned back to his steering wheel and brought the partition up. He assumed she was talking to Rob, but it might as well have been meant for both of the men in the vehicle because who, after all, dared to buck Jocelyn Carlson?

Before shifting from park to drive, Antonio pressed the intercom button. “I’ll drop you at a gentlemen’s club, sir. And then, Ms. Carlson, I’ll bring you back to your condo, unless you want to join your friend?”

“Go fuck yourself,” she spewed. “Take me home.”

A smirk formed on Antonio’s mouth as he pulled back onto the main drag. He laughed in his head; a release greater than the largest orgasm was now flooding his entire being. A word came to mind:
Liberation
. Fucking freedom. He hadn’t felt such a rush in as long as he could remember.

He stopped at a traffic light a block from the strip club called The Wet Spot. He knew the owner and owed him the business. He felt rage emanating from behind him, Jocelyn Carlson’s crass and
self-entitled
aura seeping through the partition, under the seats, and through the micro spaces in the privacy window. He wished the witch would get out of the vehicle with her friend, but it almost didn’t matter if she did. The oozing disdain from her royal highness met with the new, impenetrable shield Antonio felt surrounding him.

“Hey, man, I wanna tip you, but I don’t have any smaller bills. Could you come in for a second, I’ll break this hundred spot she gave me and—”

“No, man. It’s fine. Go on in and enjoy. I appreciate the thought, though. Really.”

He never stepped foot inside the clubs. He’d always hated the vibe and what the dancers lowered themselves to. The clubs made him feel gross. Even driving his first gigs in his hometown in Mexico, having to go into those places to wrangle up his clients to get them to the next destination, he’d always felt an urgent need for a sanitizing shower. He’d been nearly
obsessive-compulsive
about it. But it was always hours before he’d make it home, and that drove him insane. So he held firm to a blanket rule: never go inside.

His remaining passenger cleared her throat loudly, which, he’d learned from months of driving Jocelyn Carlson, was her most polite version of “fucking drive faster.” He couldn’t wait to be done with her and her special brand of degradation.

“Take me to my loft in the City instead.” The woman’s shrill directive came through the intercom.

Of course.
Not to her luxury condo in Jersey City, a
thirty-minute
drive from Newark, but her Manhattan apartment, an hour plus away. Two hours round trip. Antonio reserved certain terms for only the most deserving people, and now she was officially one of them.
Fucking
cunt!

Fine, though. He’d do it. But he officially swore on his mother’s grave that he would no longer sacrifice his dignity to meet his financial target, his “number” he called it. No, it didn’t matter how much longer it took him, he’d get back to his home, his Puerto Vallarta, with his chest out and his head held high. Sky fucking high.

*

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen you cry, Jana Park. Like, ever.”

Jana hid her face behind her locker door. She’d held it in check until the locker room. Then the dam had broken. But at least, when Ashley had woken up from the amputation, Jana was right where she’d been when the child had drifted off, wearing an expression of sheer strength and bravery.

“It’s the lack of sleep between
back-to
-backs.” Jana wiped her eyes but kept hidden still.

“Your schedule is all screwed up, girl. And I’m the one with the
eight-month
-old!” Luly laughed, coming up behind Jana and giving her a squeeze. “You need to take something and get some rest.” Luly had been through four years of the grueling MMU nursing program with Jana.

Jana was the rock, and Luly was the soft green moss, the sweet motherly heart. Jana had kept Luly fighting through to graduation while Luly
force-fed
Jana
home-cooked
meals during their years of study sessions. Without Luly, Jana was sure she’d have starved or she’d have overdosed on preservatives from microwave meals. Jana hid it well, but she really loved Luly’s affectionate nature. She needed nurturing, although she would never admit it out loud.

Luly squeezed her even tighter, and many beats passed. Jana patted her hand in thanks as a signal that she’d had enough, enough sentimentality. She definitely had her limits, and her limit was met.

Then Ilana walked in. “People die, lose limbs, shit happens, right Jana?” Ilana asked with icy shards in her tone as Luly let go of Jana. “Oh shit…Jana! Did you get the message from your mother? She called like three times! Thanks for sending me to be your personal secretary, though.”

Ignoring Ilana, not even willing to dignify the other woman’s instigation with a response, she held back the question of what her mother had wanted. Instead, Jana dug through her locker, lifting her purse and coat sleeve to find her phone. Seven missed calls from her mother. And the text from her brother that she’d ignored five hours before for the incoming codes blue and pink. She studied the text, scrutinized it.

“What is it?” Luly asked.

“I’ve got to go.” Jana felt dizzy, her mouth dried up, and her breathing turned shallow and strained.
Focus.
She yanked her things out of her locker and spun around to leave, shifting into high gear to face a new trauma that had just crashed into her world.

The trauma was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she was born and raised, more than an hour away in peak traffic. It was a coronary, a
sixty-one
-
year-old
male.

Her father.

*

Jana rushed out and Luly followed close behind her. Despite Jana’s short stride, she moved like a bullet train through the corridors now. Luly ramped up to a jog to keep up, and through her panting, she peppered Jana with questions and supportive instructions. But Jana tuned her out. She needed to make out her mother’s barely audible voicemail, which was in half frantic Korean, and part rushed Spanglish. But Jana got the gist of it.

Chang Park had been rushed to the Fort Lee Hospital after falling to the floor with chest pains at their family’s Korean restaurant six hours ago. He’d had a heart attack. While she’d been caring for an innocent little girl who’d lost her father, Jana’s own father had been undergoing a quadruple bypass.

A flood of icy fear rushed from her own chest to her head. She shouldn’t feel bad. After all she’d done for them, for her parents. But damn it, family first.
Goddamn it, Jana!
Her
own
dad.

“I’ll call you from the bus, Luly. And I need to call Nora too. Shit! Can you give her a heads up and that I’ll reach out as soon as I can?”

“Of course, and no worries on that front. The woman loves you to death.”

God, she hoped her boss loved her enough to keep her spot on the team open.

Okay, what else?
Jana paused, her belongings held to her chest, unsure if she’d forgotten anything. She should stop at her place first because, God, how long would she be gone?

Then a voice from down the hall jolted her, ringing painfully in her ears. “I’ll cover your shifts, Jana, if you need to be gone for a while!” Ilana crowed.

“Screw her. Don’t worry about a thing, Jana. You take care of what you need to, and I’ll handle
that
one. Call me—like,
when-your
-
ass-hits
-
the-seat
call me. I love you!” Luly’s voice trailed as the automatic doors closed behind her. Jana flagged a cab, cutting off two other hailers without a thought.

“SoHo, 111 Sullivan then Port Authority. Fast.”

Cab home, grab essentials, bus across to Jersey. Pray to the traffic
gods.

“Nothin’s gonna be fast right now, lady. Not on hump day. They say it’s the most congested day of the—”

“Just, please!”
Breathe, Jana.
“Do what you have to, and drive.”

Shit, should she have taken the subway? No, she needed not to think right now. She needed to zone. Point A to B. No decisions in between. She tossed a crisp twenty over the partition as the cab crept into the
hardly-moving
traffic. Maybe she’d switch to the uptown train from her place to the bus station. But she hated to be walking with her roller luggage.