her shoulders. ‘Just hold on for a few minutes longer. Your son will probably be in shock when the boat reaches us. The sun may be shining but the water out there is pretty cold. How old is he?’
‘He’s thirteen.’
Francesca’s brain was rapidly calculating the drugs she might need for an adolescent. It was always tricky to calculate for kids—everything was generally based on their weight as children came in all different shapes and sizes. And from her experience, at a time of emergency the last thing a parent remembered was their child’s weight. It didn’t matter. It was worth a try.
‘Do you know how much Ryan weighs?’
The woman shook her head. Just as she’d suspected. If necessary, she’d have to make an educated guess when she saw him. Hopefully by then the rest of the team would have arrived.
Please don’t let her have to resuscitate a child. She’d done it a few times in A and E and had been haunted by every occasion.
The motorboat was getting closer. Francesca recognised a few crewmen who must have commandeered some poor unsuspecting local’s boat. Fear crept through her. The teenager was sitting at one side, a blanket flung around his shoulders, his face pale and water dripping from his hair. But the officer lay unmoving in the bottom of the boat—never a good sign. One of the other crewmen was leaning over him, so she couldn’t see clearly what was going on.
The boat bobbed alongside them and she leapt over the gap to the other craft. She took a few seconds to check Ryan over. He was conscious, he was breathing and his pulse was strong. How he looked was another matter entirely. ‘Get him onshore and get one of the medical team to assess him,’ she instructed, before pushing the others out of her way to get to the man.
She glanced at his face and noted the three gold stripes on his shoulders. Not only an officer—but a senior officer. The uniform was familiar but the face wasn’t. Maybe he wasn’t one of theirs?
She was on autopilot now, the adrenaline bringing back all the things she’d thought she’d forgotten. She knelt by him, putting her head down next to his, her eyes level with his chest looking for the rise and fall that was distinctly lacking. Her fingers went to the side of his neck, checking for a carotid pulse. Nothing. She tipped his head back and had a quick check of his airway. Clear.
She didn’t hesitate. She could do this in her sleep. On some occasions she almost had done this in her sleep. Some skills were never forgotten.
She took two deep breaths, forming a tight seal around his mouth with her own, and breathed into him, watching for the rise of his chest. She pulled at the white jacket, ripping down the front, and gold buttons pinged off and scattered around the bottom of the boat, revealing a plain white T-shirt underneath. She wasn’t going to waste time trying to remove it. The firm muscles of his chest were clearly outlined and she had all the definition she needed.
She positioned her hands on his chest and started cardiac massage, counting in her head as she went. She was frantically trying to remember everything she could about drowning victims—an area she had little experience in. It seemed almost absurd when she was working on a cruise ship—but most passengers never came into contact with the sea. Didn’t they have quite a good chance of survival if they were found quickly enough? She knew that there had been newspaper stories about children with hypothermia being pulled from frozen lakes and resuscitated successfully. But although this man’s skin was cold, he wasn’t hypothermic. There wasn’t going to be any amazing news story here.
She kept going, conscious of voices behind her and shouted instructions. There was a thud as the boat rocked and a pair of black shiny shoes landed next to her. Her heart gave a sigh of relief. David Marsh was here to help her but she didn’t stop what she was doing, leaning over and giving two long breaths again.
‘Throw me over a defib and a bag and mask,’ came the shout next to her.
Francesca kept going, the muscles in her arms straining as she started cardiac massage again. David was more than capable of organising everything around them.
She was counting again in her head. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four… Come on. She willed him to show some sign of recovery.
The handsome Italian features weren’t lost on her. The dark brown hair, long eyelashes, strong chin, wide-framed body and muscled limbs. This man could be very impressive—if he was standing up.
David was pulling up the T-shirt that had been underneath his officer’s jacket. ‘I don’t recognise him.’ He squinted. ‘Who on earth is he?’
She shook her head, ‘I have no idea. Somehow I think I would have remembered this one.’
He slapped the pads on the muscular brown chest that Francesca was desperately trying not to notice and turned to switch on the machine. Then, before her eyes, the lean stomach muscles twitched. ‘Wait!’ she shouted.
She held her breath for a few seconds and then he did it again. Twitched. And then coughed and spluttered everywhere. The Venetian water erupted from his lungs all over the deck around them and she hurried to help him on his side.
The monitor kicked into life, picking up his heart rate. His breathing was laboured and shallow. David read her thoughts and handed her over a cylinder of oxygen with a mask as he slipped a pulse oximeter on the man’s finger.
Francesca bent over the man, blocking out the bright sunlight and shading his face from the nosy bystanders. She spoke in a low, calm voice. ‘I’m holding an oxygen mask next to your face to help your breathing,’ she said, praying he would understand because right now she had no idea if he spoke English. He opened his eyes. They were brown. Deep dark brown.
Wow.
But she must think purely as a professional. She must ignore everything about the Italian hunk they’d just pulled from the water. All the little things that would normally have sent shivers skittering down her spine.
She pulled her penlight from her pocket. This man probably had a head injury. She’d seen him being bounced off the port wall. She lifted his groggy eyelids and shone the light first in one eye and then the other. He gave the smallest flinch.
Pupils equal and reactive. She turned to David. ‘We need to start proper neuro obs on this guy.’
He nodded. ‘What happened?’
‘He went in to rescue the boy. Once he’d got him the current carried them to the port wall and he was knocked unconscious. I think he was under the water for just over a minute.’ Her hand reached around to the back of his head. His dark brown hair was wet but she could feel some abrasions at the back of his head. She pulled her hand back—blood.
‘Can you give me something to patch this before we move him, please, David?’
David nodded and handed her some latex gloves and a dressing pad. ‘Stretcher will be here in a minute. We’ll get him onto the trolley and see if we can find some ID.’
Francesca hadn’t lifted her head. He was still groggy. In all the TV shows she’d ever watched, victims of a near-drowning seemed to get up almost as soon as they were revived and walk off down the beach into the sunset. Usually hand in hand with their rescuer.
The thought of walking off into the sunset with this guy was definitely appealing. Like something out a fairy-tale. If only he would come round.
As a child she’d always loved the childhood fairy-tales Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood. Her father had read them to her over and over again. Those were some of her fondest memories of him.
She leaned in a little closer to the man. If she really wanted to do a set of neurological observations on this guy then she needed to try and elicit some kind of response from him, a response to a painful stimulus.
‘Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,’ she whispered.
CHAPTER TWO
GABRIEL was in a dark place. Nothing.