his patient’s vital signs on the monitors, the anesthesiologist tweaked the flow of gas keeping the man under discussion…under. “I thought it was rock climbing he was into. Didn’t he climb Mt. McKinley last year?”
“I’d heard that, too.” Reverence entered Whitfield’s voice. “The man never slows down. I don’t know which I envy more. His investment portfolio or his stamina. I hiked the Grand Canyon a few years ago, but I can’t imagine climbing a mountain.”
Michelle sighed. “I wonder what he’d planned to do next.”
“I hope it wasn’t anything he had his heart set on,” Alex murmured. “The only thing this guy’s going to be climbing for a while is the training stairs in the physical therapy department.”
Looking from the four-inch gash in his thigh, she critically eyed the X-ray on the monitor beside her to judge the position of the upper, unexposed break. The team was still talking, their voices low, but everything they said only made Chase Harrington sound more and more like a man who played as hard as he worked and who wouldn’t have anything left for a relationship even if someone did slow him down long enough to snag him.
No woman in her right mind would want to fall for a man like that. A woman needed a partner, someone to share with. Someone who cared enough to be there even when things got rough. Someone who wouldn’t walk away, leaving her to handle everything alone just when she needed him most.
She jerked her glance toward the head of the table, annoyed with herself for becoming distracted, displeased with the unwanted direction of her thoughts.
“Move that retractor higher. Perfect,” she murmured, pointedly turning her attention to debriding the open wound. “I need to cauterize these bleeders.”
Ian took his last stitch. “I’m ready to assist.”
“Would you like your music, Dr. Larson?” Rita asked her.
Alex usually liked to have music while she worked, preferably classical and mostly to keep from inadvertently humming whichever Disney tune her four-year-old son had plugged into the car stereo. But she declined the subliminal diversion tonight. As she set about the painstaking task of manipulating, drilling and pinning to stabilize the breaks, her only other thought was that Chase Harrington was going to slow down for a while, whether he liked the idea or not.
The surgery took over two hours. It took Alex another half hour to dictate nursing instructions and the surgical notes chronicling the procedure that, given the hour, she probably could have put off until morning.
She never put off anything when it came to her patients, though. It was the personal stuff she let slide—which was why her washing machine still leaked, why she hadn’t started the renovations on the potentially lovely old house she’d finally plunged in and bought last year. And why, she remembered, grimacing when she did, she was always running out of milk at home.
She’d meant to go to the grocery store after she’d picked up Tyler from child care, but they’d stopped at Hamburger Jack’s for dinner because Tyler had really, really needed the newest plastic race car that came with the kiddy meal and she’d flat forgotten about the milk.
Hoping she wouldn’t drive right past the Circle K on her way home and forget it again, she headed for the recovery room. If she hadn’t been up to her eyebrows in student loans and house and car payments, she’d have hired a personal assistant. Someone to tend to details like picking up the dry cleaning, paying bills and keeping the kitchen stocked with SpaghettiOs and Lean Cuisine.
She’d bet Chase Harrington had one.
She’d bet he had a whole bloody staff.
His long, lean body lay utterly still on one of the wheeled gurneys in the curtainless, utilitarian room. Tubes and monitor lines ran every which way, his body’s functions converted to spiking lines and digital numbers on screens and illuminated displays. The surgical drapes that had helped make him more of an anonymous procedure than a person were gone, replaced with a white thermal blanket that covered everything but one arm and his bandaged and braced leg.
Nodding to the nurse in green scrubs who’d just administered the painkiller she’d ordered, Alex stopped beside the gurney. A white gauze bandage covered his upper left cheekbone and a bruise had began to form beneath his left eye. Even battered, broken and with parts of him turning the color of a bing cherry, he was an undeniably attractive man. His features were chiseled, his nose narrow, his mouth sculpted and sensual. Dark eyebrows slashed above curves of spiky, soot-colored lashes. His hair was more brown than black, cut short and barbered with the sort of precision she supposed someone with his wealth might demand of those he paid to tend him.
“Mr. Harrington,” she said quietly, knowing he couldn’t yet focus but that he could hear her well enough. “Chase,” she expanded, offering him the comfort of hearing his name, “you came through surgery just fine. You’re in recovery. You’ll be here for a while before they take you to a room. Everything went really well.” She knew many patients emerged from anesthesia unaware that the procedure was already over. Some returned to consciousness worrying about the outcome. Either way, she never hesitated to relieve whatever anxiety she could as soon as possible. “Are you with me?”
His eyes blinked open, but she’d barely caught a glimpse of breathtaking blue before they drifted closed again.
“What time is it?”
His voice was deep, a low, smoky rasp made thick by drugs and raw from the airway that had been in his throat.
“After eleven.”
Once more he opened his eyes. Once more they drifted closed.
“Morning or night?”
“Night. You’ve just come from surgery,” she repeated, thinking he was trying to orient himself. “You were brought up here from Emergency. Do you remember what happened?”
His brow furrowed. “I was in an accident,” he murmured, trying to lift his broad hand to his forehead. An IV was taped into place in a vein above his wrist. From beneath the open edge of his blue-dotted hospital gown, EKG leads trailed over the corded muscles of his wide shoulders. “I need a…phone.”
Too drugged to master the effort, his hand fell. “I missed a meeting. It was…where was it?” he asked, sounding as if he were trying to remember where he was supposed to have been. “Why can’t I think?”
“Because the anesthetic is still in your system,” she told him, rather surprised he sounded as coherent as he did. It took a while for such heavy anesthesia to loosen its grip. Normally, all a patient wanted to do was sleep. Yet, he refused to give up and let the drugs carry him off again. “That’s perfectly normal. Just forget about the phone for now.”
“Can’t. It was important,” he stressed thickly.
“Nothing’s as important right now for you as rest.”
His hand lifted once more, this time to stop her. “Don’t go. Please.” The word came out as little more than a whisper. “Don’t.”
The metal siderails were up on the gurney. Catching his arm to keep him from pulling on a lead or bumping the IV, she lowered it to his side.
His hand caught hers. “I need to let them know.”
“Let them know what?” she asked, as surprised by the strength in his grip as by the urgency behind his rasped words. Given the sedation he’d had, that urgency totally confused her. It was the same sort of frantic undertone she’d encountered when accident victims came out of surgery worried about someone who’d been in the accident with them, an overwhelming need that reached beyond any immediate concern for themselves.
But he’d been alone. And he was talking about a meeting.
“They need to know I didn’t…stand them up.”
The soft click and beep of monitors melded with the quiet shuffle of the nurse moving around Alex as she stood