away this time and allowed himself to be examined.
It wasn’t pretty. There was a four-inch jagged laceration running along his left cheek. It had just missed his eye.
Mac felt like someone had stuck a red-hot poker in his stomach.
“You’re not part of the people who just came in, are you?” he murmured. It was a rhetorical question. The boy stared at him with wide eyes. “No, I guess not.” An urge to hug the boy swept over Mac, but he knew that would only frighten him even more. No sudden moves, no matter how altruistic. “Did someone do this to you?” The boy’s silence answered Mac’s question for him. Had it been an accident, he was certain that the boy, frightened or not, would have volunteered the information. “Okay, come with me. We’re going to make you good as new.”
Mac didn’t bother adding that the promise couldn’t be fulfilled immediately, that it would take some time and more than one operation to make things right, but those were details a frightened little boy didn’t need to hear right now. What he needed most was comfort.
He could do that much.
Very gently, he picked the boy up in his arms. Turning, Mac left the confines of the supply closet and walked out into the corridor.
The first person he saw was Nurse Icicle. It figured. But he didn’t have time to look around for someone else, someone he actually worked well with. The boy needed to have this tended to now, before an infection set in. If it hadn’t started to already.
Reaching out, Mac caught her by the shoulder before the woman could continue hurrying away to another trauma room.
“Jolene, right?”
She recognized the voice immediately. Shrugging him off, she squeezed out a terse “Nurse DeLuca,” between her teeth as she turned around.
And stopped dead.
Her eyes widened as she looked at the frightened little boy in Mac’s arms. Her mother’s heart twisted a little within her chest. A child in distress always got to her. “What happened to him?”
“Not sure,” Mac replied glibly, then looked down at the small being he was holding against him, his voice comforting as he added, “but we’re going to undo it, right, Nameless?”
Jolene stared at the world-class Romeo in front of her, torn between her readiness to dislike him and what she saw. “You don’t even know his name?”
She looked around to see if there was a worried parent hovering around somewhere close by, but there were only the same players she’d been seeing for more than the last three hours.
No one looked as if they’d lost anything but time and some skin.
He really, really didn’t care for her tone or the cool way she regarded him. As if he’d gotten his degree from the back of a comic book. But now wasn’t the time to put her in her place or to even find out just what her problem actually was.
“I know he’s bleeding and needs help. Anything else we can look into later.” He nodded past the regular rows of beds within the E.R. kept for standard cases and toward the trauma rooms. “Are there any beds available down here?”
Jolene thought for a second. “They just took two more up for surgery a few minutes ago. I think Trauma Room Two is free.” The victims had been doubled up by twos and threes, gurneys wheeled into the rooms serving as beds rather than just used for transport.
“Room two it is,” he announced cheerfully to the boy who was now wrapped around him like a small gibbon monkey around a tree, holding on for dear life. Looking over the boy’s head, Mac lowered his voice. “I’d like your help, Nurse DeLuca—unless of course you have some icebergs you need to create.”
Jolene pressed her lips together, stifling the retort that had sprang up in response. “This way.” She turned on her crepe heel and quickly led the way to the room that Jorge had only now freshly sanitized.
Once inside, she closed the door behind Mac, then hurried over to the bed as the boy was placed there. He began to whimper again.
Rather than step back the way she fully expected him to, she saw Mac take the boy’s hand in his.
“It’s going to be all right, Nameless, I promise.” Mac carefully made the boy as comfortable as possible. “You know, you’re about my nephew’s age. His name is Kirby.” He kept talking to the boy as if they were old friends, hoping to put him at ease. “Kind of a funny name for a kid, but I suspect he’ll grow into it. What do you think, Nameless? Think he will?”
The boy took a deep breath, then let it slowly out again. His small chest quavered slightly. “Tommy.”
Breakthrough, Mac thought.
He looked at the boy innocently. “You think he should be called Tommy?” Mac pretended to think the choice over. “Yeah, that’s a pretty cool name. Maybe I’ll ask him if he wants to change his name to Tommy.”
“No,” the boy contradicted softly. “My name.”
Mac maintained a serious expression as he asked, “You want to change your name to Tommy?”
For the first time, there was a hint of a smile on the small boy’s face as he looked up at him. “No, my name is Tommy.”
“Ah.” Nodding sagely at the revelation, Mac solemnly took the boy’s hand in his and shook it. “Glad to meet you, Tommy.” He inclined his head toward the boy. “I’ve got to admit that Tommy sounds a lot better than Nameless.” Still smiling, though this time it was purely for the boy’s benefit and not easy, Mac looked into the boy’s eyes. “Who did this to you, Tommy?”
She’d been grudgingly giving him points for his behavior toward the boy, but the insensitive, not to mention possibly incorrect nature of the question had Jolene taking offense for the boy’s absent parents. “You can’t just assume—”
The woman was really beginning to get on his nerves. Not even sparing her a glance, Mac held his hand up to silence her. His entire attention was focused on the boy. He needed to bridge this gap that existed between Tommy and the rest of the world.
“You can trust me, Tommy,” Mac assured him softly. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen to you again.”
A shaky sigh came from the boy’s lips and then he pressed them together before raising his eyes to Mac’s. His lower lip trembled, as if he was struggling against the urge to cry.
It was clear that he didn’t want to say anything, was afraid of saying something, whether because he thought he would be punished, or that something more dire would happen to him. To Mac, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the boy was afraid and that he had been harmed. And that he never should be again.
Tommy seemed to search his face before lowering his eyes again.
“Hugo,” the boy said so quietly that for a moment, it seemed to Mac that he’d imagined it. And then Tommy raised his head again, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “Am I gonna look like a monster?”
Finally something he could control in this awful scenario. There was no hesitation in his voice whatsoever. “No, absolutely not, Tommy. You’re going to be the same good-looking guy you always were.
“Nurse DeLuca,” he uttered Jolene’s title deliberately, his smile never wavering for Tommy’s benefit, “do you think you can put your disdain for me on hold long enough to bring me a suturing tray?”
Without waiting for her affirmative reply, Mac went on to enumerate the rest of the supplies he was going to need in order to begin the first phase of Tommy’s recovery.
He’d almost had her.
Watching Harrison MacKenzie interacting with the boy, she’d almost been touched by his behavior.
But then when he looked at her, every single warning signal in her body went on the alert. This was the arena