Читать книгу Back In Dr Xenakis' Arms - Amalie Berlin - Страница 10
ОглавлениеTHE LAST TIME Dr. Erianthe Nikolaides had set foot on the island of her birth she’d been barely sixteen, pregnant and betrayed by the boy she’d loved. Ten years on it had taken the earth actually moving and the request of her adoptive brother to pull her back.
Weeks before, Mythelios had been struck by a strong earthquake and Theo had sent up the beacon to call them home to staff the only medical facility on the island, which they were all tied to. But Theo had urged her to stay and finish her medical degree before she answered the call, so her arrival had been regrettably postponed.
The heat of the July sun baked her dark hair like coals on the back of her neck, sucking the strength from her so that every step toward the lovely three-story stucco building housing the Mythelios Free Clinic became a marathon. That was why her knees wobbled and she barely had her suitcases under control. Nothing else. Not the weight of her past and her secrets. Not the rock in her middle that came from knowing Theo Nikolaides wasn’t the only man she’d be seeing today.
Ares Xenakis had received the same call to come home that she had. Theo had summoned home the whole merry band of the pampered children of Mopaxeni Shipping, forgotten until they messed up—the men who funded and regularly staffed the clinic and Erianthe, who had nothing to offer but her skills. She’d cut all contact with her parents years ago, and that had included her trust fund.
Her training had been officially completed only last week, and she was late arriving to the disaster. She was that final piece of the family they’d forged when they’d still been counting their ages in single digits. The family that would be broken forever if the others ever found out how her seventeenth year had ended.
She clanged her way through the main entrance, her resolve to take her position at her brother’s side stronger than her ability to control the four-wheeled storage system erratically rolling behind her. One wheel caught at the door frame and her suitcase snagged just as the door swung closed on it. Perfection. It would be really great if one part of this journey could go smoothly.
She put some weight into a tug and the case snapped free, making her stagger backward into the clinic, an expletive bouncing off the teeth she’d clenched shut. By the time she turned around, every eye in the packed reception area had fixed on her with the kind of wariness that said they expected calamity to accompany such cacophony.
If the heat had left any extra air in her lungs, she would’ve laughed. The only harm she’d ever caused on Mythelios had been to herself, by trusting the wrong boy and not running away the first time her father had uttered the word convent.
The urge to laugh evaporated like water in the summer sun, but Erianthe tried to cover it with a smile, hoping to make a better impression on her future patients than that.
She’d had a week to prepare to see Ares again, to prepare for the first run-in with her treacherous parents, but she no longer had that wellspring of rage that had fueled her daydreams of vengeance in the first couple years. Now she had no idea what she should say to any of them, or even how she should feel. Ten years was a long time.
Focus on today.
The door swung shut, clamping off the blast furnace her years in England had made her weak to, and taking away the light her sun-blinded eyes needed to see.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed slowly out.
No, today was too big. She had to focus on this minute, this second. Not one of her three betrayers was presently there. She didn’t have to know how to deal with them right at this second.
It wasn’t so much that she saw someone in front of her—her eyes were still closed and obstructed by her hand—but she felt a presence in her personal bubble and opened her eyes.
“Dr. Nikolaides.”
The woman standing before her smiled, not waiting for any answer, just relieving her of her cases with one hand and using the other to steer the visibly travel-bedraggled doctor somewhere that wouldn’t affect the clinic’s image.
“Your brother is with a patient, so just have a seat in here and I’ll send him shortly.”
She clicked on a light, allowing Erianthe to see the small office she’d been ushered to—and the woman herself. Friendly, but firm, with a touch of something motherly about her—not that Erianthe had much experience with what that was like—and just enough silver hair threaded through her ebony curls to give her gravitas. To make her somehow emanate comfort as she carried on speaking in a calm tone.
Maybe it was just that Erianthe was no longer a spectacle, disrupting the waiting room, but she felt a little better. Less as if the sky was trying to press her into the rocky dirt.
The woman added something about coffee and departed, leaving Erianthe to fold into the closest chair—which happened to be one that spun.
Petra. She’d said her name was Petra.
Goodness, she had to get it together. What kind of doctor took half a minute to process something simple like a person’s name? A name she’d expected to hear, no less. The wonder woman Theo often raved about. Petra. Who had gone to fetch the magical elixir that would sharpen her buzzing senses and keep her from appearing like a bigger catastrophe than the quake had been.
The cool, supple leather of the chair reached through her light linen trousers, giving another tactile wink of comfort, soothing against the heat she’d absorbed, enough for her to notice that her head ached in a way that said it had probably been throbbing for a while.
The office door stood open and she swiveled the chair to watch through the aperture, silently counting breaths until the roar of memories she’d been trying to ignore since Theo’s call faded back a little.
The will that had carried her through those first months after her banishment forced it into something closer to a buzz. No, not a buzz—though it was just as discordant. Like her head was a radio receiver.
She stood as if at the edge of the signal for two overlapping stations—oldies and current hits. Annoying. Distorting. Confusing. Impossible to ignore. Because she knew the old song better, and it broke through the new one just enough that she wasn’t quite sure which song she was actually listening to. She could walk around in the present—she’d learned the lyrics—but the old song she knew by heart.
During the first two years after she’d been gone, the balance had been different. Her days had been filled with the oldies station, but now and then something new had broken through. Eventually she’d forced herself to learn the new words, to sing the song of today, and the balance had gradually shifted. She’d studied harder, because a mind full of calculus and physics had less room to wallow in the terrible injustice and loss of what had happened to her.
A corridor of bright light opened across the floor of the reception area, broken by a lumbering, misshapen shadow as the door swung closed, followed by the sounds of exertion. A call for help came from a rusty voice, and those she could see sitting in Reception turned worried eyes to her through the office door.
No one was out there to help. And they did see her as a doctor, no matter her clumsy, inept, socially awkward arrival.
Strength she’d been faking the whole day appeared, and Erianthe launched herself from the chair and out of the office. A man crouched on the floor beside a pregnant woman who leaned heavily on her left hip as she pressed at the right side of her swollen belly with her other hand. Six months? Seven? Less if it was multiples.
She’d made her occupation treating and helping pregnant women in distress, but when childbirth came unnaturally there was another feeling—something that twisted her insides and made her second-guess her career choice. Just for a second.
Erianthe knelt beside her, introducing herself and asking the man, “Did she fall onto the floor?”
“No. I put her down. You’re the baby doctor?” the man asked, reaching for her arm as if touching her made her more real to him, more of a comfort, and that conveyed all the trust and hope he was putting into her by giving this woman into her care.
The baby doctor. Theo must have told them she was coming.
“Yes. I’m an obstetrician. Tell me what happened.”
Just then Petra came out of somewhere with a mug of something steamy and a plate in her hand—but, seeing Erianthe kneeling beside a patient, she put them down on her reception desk and ran to get a wheelchair.
God bless her, the woman really was the dynamo Theo had promised. How had she forgotten about Petra?
The three of them got the patient transferred to the chair and Petra took control, steering them all toward the office Erianthe had just vacated and leaving them there to get files and supplies.
“You’re having pain?” Erianthe asked the woman, who nodded and pressed on her right side.
“Tell me about the pain. How did it start? Can you describe how it hurts?”
Though it was difficult for the woman to talk, within a couple short sentences Erianthe was able to determine that she was likely not dealing with a normal—if premature—birth situation.
“You were shifted to your left hip on the floor, so does it hurt more when you lie on your right?”
She took the woman’s wrist to track her pulse rate, while listening to the patient describe symptoms she had already expected: increased nausea, but only after the onset of pain, which had coincided with the sudden onset of bowel issues...
Petra returned with a familiar face in tow.
“Cailey!”
Erianthe hadn’t seen her onetime good friend since leaving the island, back when they’d become close because her mother had worked in the Nikolaides household. Cailey was someone Erianthe had always missed but had lost because she hadn’t been able to think of a way to talk to anyone and maintain her secrets back then.
Still couldn’t—not really. The first thing she wanted to do upon seeing her was confess, clear the air, but that kind of confession would only throw more debris around. They’d all choke on it.
It was hardly the time for even a proper greeting, let alone a confession, so Erianthe grabbed Cailey by the shoulders for a quick hug—she’d offer to help with the wedding when they had a few minutes to catch up. Then she got on with it, because that was what the moment demanded.
“I need temperature and blood pressure. She’s presenting with symptoms of appendicitis. Do we have a proper examination room? What about imaging equipment? I’d like to do some tests. There’s a lab, right?”
“Appendicitis?” the man asked, the wobble in his words conveying the worry of a husband and father, not just a friend. Which she should have expected if she’d given it a moment of thought. Mythelios was still quite traditional, even beyond the standards of the rest of Greek culture. And he was a good husband, if the deep furrow of his brows and the amount of lip sweat meant anything.
“That means there is an inflammation in her appendix. We’re going to check it out very well. Then we’ll know more about what we need to do to treat her. How long has the pain been going on?”
Over the next few minutes Cailey confirmed the low-grade fever that spoke of infection, and the husband spoke of having worn his wife down and made her come to the clinic after a night of increasingly unbearable pain.
“Who is our surgeon?” Erianthe would be happy when she got up to speed well enough to keep from alarming her patients by questioning the treatment options available here.
“Dr. Xenakis has the most experience,” Cailey answered.
As hard as Erianthe had worked to know as little as possible about Ares, she did at least know his specialty was emergency medicine, not surgery.
She leaned in to speak quietly to Cailey. “No general surgeon on the staff right now?”
“Ares has a great deal of experience. He got it in the field, with that unit he’s with. The one that travels to isolated areas to help people.”
Something she hadn’t been aware of. Ares was with an outreach charity? That didn’t strike her as fitting his always larger-than-life personality.
“Is he here?”
As if she didn’t know...
“He is. Let’s get Jacinda into a room,” Petra interjected, once again taking charge. “I’ll send him in. Dr. Nikolaides, do you want to change your clothes? We have extra scrubs in the corner cabinet there. Just close the door after us and change. We’ll be in the rear examination room.”
Not exactly the way she’d pictured her first day back. She had planned to say hello and tell her brother that because she felt weird about interrupting his new love nest with Cailey she was going to stay elsewhere, all the while carefully avoiding seeing Ares with the ninja-like sneaking skills she possessed only in her delusional imagination.
Now she was going into surgery with him. Another perfect point to her first day.
“You’re going to get her into CT?” she asked, snapping back into motion before Cailey could escape.
Cailey paused, the expression on her face reticent, regretful. “We don’t have a working CT scanner at the moment. Ours is on the fritz after the earthquake. I figured you’d want a CBC to check for infection?”
She waited for Erianthe to answer, but Petra kept going with Jacinda.
The CT scan wasn’t absolutely necessary—doctors had been correctly diagnosing appendicitis decades before imaging became available—but it was like a safety net. And today they would be working without a net.
“Yes to the blood panel,” she answered, weighing her options.
Flying in and out of the island was still difficult, and time was of the essence with appendicitis. She’d consult with Ares, then make the call.
Ares.
She didn’t need the warning flares her body was sending up to remind her how emotionally loaded his name was. She couldn’t even think it without those feelings of outrage and heartbreak rushing into her mouth, metallic and bitter.
Dr. Xenakis was safer. Easier on her fraying nerves.
Having something to do would help her, as it had always helped her. And helping her first patient on Mythelios would be even better. Filling up the hole that had opened in her chest with honorable duty.
The cabinet’s supply of extra scrubs needed restocking, and she made a mental note to see if an order had been made. They’d probably been hit hard in the days after the quake, when patient clothing had been ruined either in accidents or during emergency treatment and scrubs had been given out to wear instead.
She found a set of bottoms she could wear, due to the horrors of a drawstring waist, paired it with a tentlike top, then hit her suitcase for better shoes, a hairband and a stethoscope. Scrubs weren’t meant to flatter a person, and she hadn’t come home to win some kind of fashion award.
Later she’d let herself feel guilty for being glad someone needed her help. Having any kind of focus would let her meet Ares on a professional front, put all that personal stuff away—or at least make it clear to her brain what was important to the Erianthe of today: work. Personal emotional wounds, no matter how grievous, couldn’t bleed out or cause sepsis.
She’d worked cordially and professionally with both lukewarm ex-boyfriends and jerks she’d rather kick in the face than speak to, and she had never lost her cool with them. Even when there had been good reason to lose her cool. This would be no different. He was no different from any other colleague.
Closing the office door, she headed the way she’d been directed, grabbing her coffee and snack in transit, and practically inhaling half before she arrived at the patient’s room.
She reached for the knob of the exam room door, but before her hand closed on it Theo appeared at her side and immediately grabbed her in a quick hug that required she hold her arms out in a wide V to avoid dousing him in coffee.
Ever affectionate, even after the years of absence and neglect she’d forced on them both by staying so far away that his only choice in seeing her had been to come to her, this small display of affection when she was already worked up caused her throat to constrict. There was nothing she’d have liked better than to take shelter in the arms of someone she knew would always have her back. If she ever let herself ask.
It galled her how close to the surface those old feelings had risen since she’d gotten off the boat.
Turning her head, she kissed his cheek—something she could do—then stepped abruptly back. “Careful—you’ll end up with coffee down your back.”
“Glad you’re here,” he said, in that laughing way of his. “We’ll catch up after, shall we? Are you up to seeing her? Do you need anything from me?”
He was worried about her—and probably the patient too. Theo always worried about her, and one thing she hoped to accomplish by coming home was relieving that worry without burdening him with the secrets she’d hidden from everyone. Seeing this first patient to the best possible outcome would be a good start.
She smiled, but then it wasn’t hard to smile at her almost inhumanly good-natured brother. “I didn’t walk here, or cross loads of time zones. I’m completely fine. I’m waiting for the blood work to get back to call it officially, but I’d be very shocked if there are no signs of infection. If she needs surgery, then I’m assisting.”
He considered her for the swiftest second, then nodded. “Whatever you say. You’re the only obstetrician on the island since last spring, so you’re automatically picking up a full load of patients. We stay pretty busy, and we’re always looking for more people, but you’re going to need to hire a midwife and nurses. We’ll talk about that later.”
More bits of information to file away for later. Good. All good things. Fill her head with work—best thing for her.
Work had always saved her—or had done since the convent. The shock to her system from being sent away from everything and everyone she knew had helped kill the rebellious bent of her teenage years, but it had been the desire to provide for her child that had turned her life and her attitude around. And afterward study had been the only thing she’d had to cling to. She’d developed steady hands, a steady voice and eventually steady thoughts.
But seeing Ares again would hurt, and even walking into a room he might already be in felt like reaching into an oven without gloves on—stupid, dangerous, damaging...
She knocked and entered. Her eyes sought every corner of the room, and when they failed to find Ares anywhere, they found their focus instead.
Cailey had peeled the paper backing off a bandage and applied it to the crook of Jacinda’s arm; the blood was already drawn.
The husband hovered, tears in his eyes.
Her patient, now in a hospital gown, lay curled on her left side. When she moved, and another pang hit her, her face crumpled in a way that drew attention to how young she was—just on the other side of twenty. But she didn’t cry out. She was not giving an inch to her pain, with the will of someone who’d already survived more than this could amount to in her life.
Five minutes later Erianthe had double-checked for signs of early labor, gotten up to speed on her patient’s medical history, and was gingerly palpating her right side in the waist region when Ares burst in.
She’d almost started to relax, but that ended the second he arrived. He said nothing, and she didn’t look over at him, but she felt him there—like the tingle of power in the air after a lightning strike.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see his height, knew him to be taller than he’d been before, but couldn’t bring herself to look at him directly yet.
“I’m Dr. Xenakis.”
A pang vibrated in her belly, like a gong calling every cell in her body to attention.
That voice wasn’t the voice that had whispered in her ear, murmured the sweet, artless words of a lust-drunk teenager, it was deeper and more resonant. Different. But the way he spoke...
She’d never have mistaken his voice for another. There was a sort of roundness to his speech, an almost magical way of making simple words luxurious, like things you wanted to touch, to wrap yourself up in.
It took her aback, and if she was going to function at all, she had to stay in the present, not go back to when she’d believed him to be the very essence of warmth, love and safety. Better to stay here, where she knew his promises had been knit with strands of bitter lies and had shattered under the weight of a few firm words.
No protection. No safety. No love.
It was different, because she knew better now.
The others—Theo, Chris, Deakin and all the professional organizations who had licensed him—trusted Ares with patients, and so would she. Because she had no choice. And it wasn’t as if she had to count on him tomorrow. Just today. She wouldn’t fall into that well of longing if she looked at him.
That little reminder made it possible, even a little easy, to finally look at him.
“Dr. Nikolaides said we had a—” His words came to a sudden, jarring halt when he focused on her.
Different, her mind reminded her simplistically. Hairy was the next descriptor. He’d always been polished, with his dark hair cut every three weeks to keep the curls from taking over. Now his hair was long. Long enough to wear in a ponytail at the back of his head. But it was the beard that really brought the difference into focus. She’d never seen a doctor, let alone a surgeon, with such thick facial hair.
The air around him still said Ares, and his eyes—those vibrant green eyes that made her hate the first leaves of spring—were the same. But nothing else matched the Wildman in Scrubs she saw now.
Still, her hands shook. Her breath shook. Her heart and belly and all parts in the middle... For a second she even thought it might be a late aftershock hitting the island, but no one else looked alarmed or off-kilter. Just her. And him—staring at her with cavernous silence.
“Appendicitis.” Erianthe forced the word out, then took Jacinda’s hand, turning her attention back to her patient.
He’s just another doctor. Just another colleague. Pretend he’s Dr. Stevenson, the brilliant jerk from your last hospital.
What would she say to Stevenson?
She’d be bold. Certain. She was certain.
“It’ll take another ten minutes for the leukocyte count to come back, but it’s a formality. We should start prepping the surgical suite.”
Another glance confirmed he’d gotten stuck in...what? The past? A desire to run? Dealing with the juxtaposition of seeing her again over a heavily pregnant belly when the last time he’d seen her she’d been carrying his own child?
“Dr. Nikolaides?” Jacinda’s voice contained enough alarm to reclaim all Eri’s focus. “Your hand is shaking.”
Damn. She smiled at Jacinda, even if it was a dodge in order to keep from talking about the fact that her focus was split. It shouldn’t be split. And it wouldn’t be. This event would pass—she’d force it down and contain it.
“It’s just a need for coffee.”
“Not because you’re worried for the baby?”
That she could be truthful about. “You’re far enough along that anesthesia is safe for both of you, and we’re going to take the very best care of you and your baby. I don’t want you to worry.”
She let go of Jacinda’s hand and got her coffee again, tipped it to take a big drink with a hand she willed steady by mentally playing through the steps of the coming procedure. Force of will and work always saved her.
Ares finally started moving and stepped around the table to the right of Erianthe. She eased higher up, to keep plenty of space between them, but despite that she still felt him enter her personal bubble, as distinctly as the whiff of ozone in the first minutes of a hard summer rain.
“Where is the pain?” he asked Jacinda, and then followed that up with all the other questions he needed to ask in order to make his own assessment.
Not a criticism, she reminded herself. Any good doctor would do the same. And Dr. Stevenson would’ve handled it far more condescendingly.
She stayed largely silent and focused on Jacinda. If she wanted to stay with her patient during the surgery, she and Dr. Xenakis needed to get over this. Be completely professional and in the present. Be strangers.
The way he looked, she could almost believe it. Ten years was a long time—they practically were strangers. Or at least she was a stranger to him. Even the strongest woman couldn’t go through all that and come out unchanged.
“It’s hurting too far up,” he said, somewhat quietly. “It’s not appendicitis.”
No accusation—just a statement. But it was an incorrect diagnosis on his part.
“In the third trimester,” she said, surprising herself by how level her voice stayed, “the appendix gets shoved out of the pelvic cradle by the growing baby.”
Both patient and husband turned their gaze to Ares, and his silence forced her to look once more at him.
She ignored the pang that turned to a swirling in her insides when she looked into his beautiful eyes.
Now he’d got past that brick wall his words had run into upon seeing her, the set of his mouth in that Wildman beard proved he felt the strain of their reunion as well.
“I assure you that I’ve seen this condition several times, Dr. Xenakis.”
He didn’t simply watch her now, and his frowning stare could mean lots of things—but none of them were good. Most likely his frown meant he was questioning her diagnosis.
Shoving his hand roughly to the back of his neck, he rubbed like it was on fire. “Would you come with me to brief our anesthesiologist, Dr. Nikolaides?”
No.
Her body shrieked the word along every nerve ending, and she knew she’d gone pale by the funny looks she was receiving. So much for trying to remain calm and appear as though there was no liquid panic rushing through her veins.
She nodded—an act of will—and once that domino fell, others followed.
Everything was fine. She should be happy they had an anesthesiologist. Relief was the only acceptable emotion right now. Forget the rest.
“I’d like Cailey to stay with them,” she managed to say, and waited for Ares to fetch her soon-to-be sister-in-law, giving her a moment to reassure her patient again and project the confidence she would surely start to feel any second now.
Cailey brought the lab results with her, and Erianthe peeked at three numbers before giving a couple of quick instructions, then following Ares.
Just another room. Just another doctor. Everything was normal. This walk didn’t lead to a gas chamber. Just to a conference with another colleague.
Having never come to the clinic before, there was nothing for her to do but follow Ares to the anesthesiologist’s office.
At the end of a short corridor, he opened a door and held it for her.
Polite. Common courtesy. Normal.
She stepped in.
Tension in her shoulders spread to her chest as she scanned the unlit room. No desk. No people. Two bunk beds.
Not an office.
This must be the on-call room for the doctors. Her thought train derailed there. Rounding on him, she reached for the doorknob, her body registering her unease before she thought of a rational response.
“Erianthe?”
“There’s no anesthesiologist,” she blurted out.
He stood in her way, and that was enough to make her draw back from the door and her only escape route.
“I’ve never done an appendectomy on a pregnant woman. You want me to go with your diagnosis—I get it. She’s in a lot of pain, and her appendix could rupture before we get her to Athens. But—”
“Where is the anesthesiologist?” she interrupted, cutting her hand through the air to make him focus, because knowing he wasn’t about to attack her didn’t make being alone with him feel any less dangerous.
“Not here. They called him in already. He’s on his way. Before he gets here, tell me exactly how many of these surgeries you’ve been involved in. I’ve performed emergency appendectomies, but none where the appendix wasn’t in the lower right quadrant. We don’t have a CT scan to work from, so we don’t have a lot of options, but if your diagnosis is incorrect, this is unnecessary surgery. It puts her and the baby at risk. And the weight of that call is on me.”
There it was—the elephant in the room, its neon hide impossible to ignore. Words flew out of her. “Do you really think that I, of all people, would put a baby in needless danger?”
The color drained from his cheeks, confirming that her words had struck right where she’d intended. He stepped back from her, opening up a space that had suddenly become tight and toxic.
“No.” It took him several seconds to make that one-word answer, and in this small room she couldn’t help but look at him, watch him, try to read him—not that she’d done so well in reading him when she’d been young and foolish enough to trust him.
