taxi from Lido di Venezia to St. Mark’s, and then the next thing I know we’re in the water. Oh, goodness, where is my wife?”
“What is her name?” Shay asked.
“Jennifer Sanders.”
“I’ll find her for you in a moment,” Shay said gently. “It’s important we make sure you’re okay first.”
“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs,” the man said, his voice rising in panic.
Dante shot her a concerned look. “What is your name, signor?”
The man looked at Dante. “Are you the doctor?”
“Sì. Can you tell me your name?”
“James, but my friends call me Jim.”
Dante smiled at him. “I’m going to examine your abdomen. Tell me if anything hurts, and then we’ll get an MRI of your spine.”
The man nodded. Shay lifted his shirt and there was dark bruising; his belly was distended, which was a sign there was internal bleeding. The bleeding would have to be stopped before they could worry about his back. In this case internal bleeding trumped paralysis.
The man cried out when Dante did a palpation over his spleen.
“We need to get a CT scan of his abdomen, see how bad the bleeding is,” Dante whispered to Shay.
“Where do I go to order that?” she asked.
“I will. You stay with him. Prep him for the procedures.” Dante left the room.
Shay calmed their patient down and got an IV started, drawing the blood work needed before surgery. She had no doubt that with extensive bruising and pain Jim would need surgery and fast.
“What’s your name?” Jim asked.
“Shay Labadie,” she said as she took his vitals, writing them down.
“Baton Rouge?” he asked.
“No, close, though. New Orleans proper.” She smiled.
“I thought it was a Louisiana accent. I’m from Mississippi. Picayune to be exact.”
“Not far, then.” She smiled at him warmly, trying to reassure him as his blood pressure was rising.
He grinned faintly as his eyes rolled back into his head and the monitors went into alarm.
“I need a crash cart!” she shouted, slamming her hand against the code blue button as the rest of the team in the room jumped into action. Some situations transcended the language barrier.
* * *
“Nurse Labadie, if you contact Dr. Prescarrie, he is the neurologist. He’ll be able to determine the extent of the nerve damage in our patient.” Dante wanted to keep Shay busy, keep her away from the OR table, but she didn’t budge. She stood by his side, passing him the instruments he needed without him having to ask for them.
She knew exactly what he needed and when.
And she was so calm about it. That was what bothered him the most. As if nothing fazed her.
She was good at her job.
Though he shouldn’t be surprised. He’d been impressed by her when they were in Oahu together at the conference. Only he hadn’t got to see her actually work. Now he had that privilege, but he was also very aware of the fact that she was pregnant.
With his child.
Maybe your child.
He was still reeling over the realization Shay was here and pregnant with his child as he removed Mr. Sanders’s badly damaged spleen.
“I will contact him, but does he speak English?” she asked.
“He speaks French and I know that you can speak that. I heard you speak that before.”
“Okay, I’ll have him paged once Mr. Sanders is stable.” She handed him a cautery that he didn’t ask for, but damn if he didn’t need it right at that moment.
“Grazie,” he said grudgingly.
“You seem tense, Dr. Affini,” Shay remarked.
“Of course I’m tense. I have a man open on the table.”
And you’ve just walked back into my life carrying my baby.
Her presence here totally threw his controlled world off balance. Thoughts of Shay were kept to the privacy of his memories. To the nights he was alone and lonely, wishing he could have more than he was allotted in life. That was when he thought of Shay and their time together.
He’d romanticized her. The one stolen moment he could treasure forever and now she was here and he wasn’t sure how to handle it.
Her presence unnerved him completely.
“Is there anything I can do to ease your tension?” she asked. “I mean, if my job as a scrub nurse isn’t up to scratch...”
“It’s fine. There is nothing you can do. Well, there is one thing, but you refused.” He quickly glanced over at her and he could see her brow furrow above that surgical mask.
“This is not the time to discuss it.” There was a hint of warning in her voice.
Dante raised his eyebrows. He’d never heard Shay speak in that tone before. Even at the conference when there were idiots either hitting on her or talking over her, because she was just a nurse, she’d always smiled sweetly and taken them down a peg. This was something different.
A clear warning.
“Why not? I like chatting while I work.” He didn’t, but he liked getting under her skin the way she got under his.
She snorted. “You didn’t seem very receptive to talking before.”
“It depends what the subject is,” he teased.
“Well, I can say in no uncertain terms the subject you want to discuss, Dr. Affini, is off-limits.”
He chuckled but didn’t say anything further to her as he completed the splenectomy and stabilized the patient. Once he was done, Shay walked away from him and he could see her on the operating theatre’s phone, obviously paging Dr. Prescarrie about Mr. Sanders’s spinal injuries.
Not only was he impressed by her skill in a surgical situation, but he admired her strength. Women in his circles usually would balk under interrogation. Of course, women in his circles, women like Olivia, wouldn’t even be in an operating theatre, getting their hands dirty.
“What you do is noble, Dante. It’s just that I don’t want to hear about it. Can’t you just keep that to yourself?”
“And what am I supposed to talk about, Olivia? Fashion, cars?”
“The vineyards and, yes, it wouldn’t hurt you to immerse yourself in the world of privilege you were born into.”
Dante snorted as he pulled off his gloves and gown, disposing of them.
Olivia had hated that he was a trauma surgeon, working in a public hospital rather than in a private clinic. And his choice of surgery. Why couldn’t he do something like plastic surgery?
In her mind, a prince who was a surgeon needed to do something glamorous that dealt with the glitterati, not just anybody who stumbled in through the doors.
Only that wasn’t him. That was his father’s world and he loathed it.
Dante might be a prince, poised to inherit a large vineyard in Tuscany and his villa on the Lido di Venezia, as well as a hefty sum of money, but Prince was just a title. It wasn’t as if he were a member of the British royal family set to inherit the throne.
Being a prince was just a status in Italy. Nothing more.
His work as a surgeon