Darlene Graham - The Pull Of The Moon

That ward clerk was wrong, Danni thought as she rushed forward to help. This guy doesn’t look anything like Tom Selleck, And right now his face was so contorted with anger, his eyes were so wild with delirium, you couldn’t even call him handsome.

“Let me see them!” he yelled as he shoved the nurses’ hands away. “Dammit! I have to see if they’re okay!”

One of his fireman buddies, a black man in full regalia except for the helmet, ran up alongside the gurney and got into the act. “Matt, you need that oxygen,” he said as he forced the mask over the patient’s face and fought to get his mighty shoulders back down on the gurney.

“What’s he had?” Danni yelled across to a nurse, and as soon as she heard the answer added, “Get me some Ativan.” The other nurse had gone off, anticipating the order, and a full syringe was instantly in Danni’s hand.

“You hold him,” Danni ordered the black fireman.

The patient fought like a bull, still ranting about the toddlers, while Danni shot the sedative into a vein.

When the patient finally moaned into semiconsciousness, the black man released his hold and turned to Danni. “It’s not Matt’s fault. This is old stuff—” The big man suddenly seemed choked up. “He worked the bombing. Saving these babies tonight kind of brought it all back.”

The bombing. In Oklahoma they simply called it that—the bombing.

Danni nodded and felt her eyes mist when she turned to look at the man on the gurney as the nurses rolled him away, and saw the top of his dark head as he tossed it miserably from side to side.

The bombing—after all this time, so many still suffered from its aftershocks. Like that poor man.

“Matt’s usually a really nice guy,” the black man said from behind her. “Are you gonna take care of his arm?” he added anxiously.

Danni turned and looked up at him. This one was a handsome man, even though he looked thoroughly exhausted. “No. I’m an obstetrician, but one of the E.R. docs—”

Before she could finish, a harried-looking nurse rushed up and said, “Dr. Goodlove, please,” while she hauled Danni by the sleeve of her lab coat into an open area where the sight of five mounded tummies on five beds made Danni groan.

“All in active labor.” The nurse held out a stack of intake charts. “Stone says they’re all yours.”

“Gee. Could the Old Man be testing me again?” Danni took the charts.

“Again? When did he stop?” The nurse plunked a Doppler device and a bottle of blue gel on top of the charts. “Don’t worry, we finally located Dr. Bryant. Claimed his pager wasn’t working.”

Danni made a sarcastic face. “Oh, goody. Bryant.” Bryant, if anything, was a bigger pain than Stone. As the chief of staff, Kenneth Stone, at least, was supremely confident and above petty one-upsmanship. Bryant was not. Only a hair older than Danni, he was fiercely competitive.

Moments later, when Roger Bryant came blasting through the E.R. doors like a Viking god to the rescue, Danni studiously ignored him and let the triage nurse give him report.

Another hour flew by while Bryant and Danni got the OB patients examined and admitted.

“I’ll go up and cover Labor and Delivery now,” Bryant said and ran a hand through his fine, sandy-blond hair, then pointed at Danni as he backed toward the elevator, beating an obvious retreat from the E.R. chaos. “You’d better take a break, sister. You look terrible.”

“Oh, my gosh!” Danni framed her cheeks with her palms. “Imagine that! I look terrible!” She addressed this remark to Carol Hollis, her best friend and a top-notch scrub nurse, who’d appeared on her left.

“Gee,” Carol deadpanned, then raised her voice as the elevator doors slid closed over Bryant’s sour expression. “Could four deliveries and two C-sections have anything to do with it?”

Carol straightened, tossed her salt-and-pepper curls toward the elevator and muttered, “Prick.” She turned to Danni. “But unfortunately, the prick can’t handle what’s developing upstairs.”

“What’s that?”

“Another C-section.”

“When?”

“Maybe an hour. That’s why I came down to find you.”

Danni held up a palm. “Okay. But first I gotta eat something or I’ll pass out.”

But just as Danni and Carol plopped down in the break area, a nurse poked her head in the door and pleaded, “Dr. Goodlove, before you go back to OB could you possibly see the fireman?”

Danni gulped milk from a carton, then rubbed the back of her neck, not comprehending something this nurse obviously thought she should. “The fireman?”

“Yeah. The guy who pulled the twins out of the trailer. He’s been waiting for over an hour. Somebody needs to check his lungs again and he has a nasty wound that needs stitches.” The nurse shrugged apologetically while she held out a disposable suture tray. “We’re swamped. In fact, we’re so crowded we had to put the poor man in the supply room. Could you?”

“I’ll help,” Carol offered. “Bryant can survive a little while without you.”

Danni sighed. Would this night never end? “Okay.” She stood, tilted the milk carton up and drained it. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE SUPPLY ROOM WAS cramped, even without the gurney, even without the over-six-feet of massive male snoring under the buzzing fluorescent light.

He was all alone, out cold, taking straight oxygen from a mask attached to a tank. He reeked of smoke and sweat, a few plastic cups littered the floor around him—at least they’d given him some water—and a thin blanket covered him to his chin. The dressing and cold compresses on the injured arm were pink-tinged with blood now, and the IV dripping into his other arm was almost empty.

Shameful, Danni thought. This is how we treat our heroes? She slipped the chart from under a corner of the gurney mattress and read.

Matthew Creed, age thirty-six. In addition to the Ativan, they’d given him a wallop of Demerol in the IV. There were third-degree bums on the same arm that had been gashed—by glass, the triage nurse had written.

As with every firefighter who plunged into a raging fire, the guy’s lungs were the big worry. But so far, everything—electrolytes, blood gases—looked okay. And his color was within normal limits.

Assessing his face at rest, Danni decided that he was handsome. His eyelids, though puffy—she made a note of the edema—were framed by thick dark brows and a line of lush black lashes any cover model would envy. Beneath the mask his square jaw was darkly shadowed with new-grown stubble.

His black hair, probably cut in a short, professional style, was now plastered straight up above a red crease where his helmet band had fit tightly. There was no apparent head trauma. She scribbled another note.

She handed the chart to Carol, peeled back the blanket to check the rest of him. He continued to snore into the oxygen mask.

“Holy cow,” Carol muttered, and Danni shot her a censuring frown.

But Carol persisted. “Man!” she mumbled as she turned to prepare the suture tray. “I feel like I need a hit of that oxygen myself.”

Though Danni disapproved of Carol’s attitude, she could see her point. The patient had been stripped to the waist and he was big. Bronze. Amazingly fit. “Is there a weight recorded on the chart?” Danni asked. He was probably a lot heavier than he looked. She wanted to be sure he’d gotten enough pain medication.

“Two hundred fifteen,” Carol read.

Danni nodded as she scanned his frame, looking for further damage, signs, symptoms.

He had huge muscular arms, massive hands, and a trail of black body hair that swirled neatly down taut abdominals. When she woke him up she’d have to make sure everything under his turnout pants and fire boots was okay.

She gently raised the edge of the dressing on his arm and called his name. “Mr. Creed?”

There was no response.

“Matthew?” As she reached for a pulse on the uninjured arm, a rolled-up, faded-red bandanna, knotted around his wrist, got in the way. She muttered something to Carol about why the EMTs hadn’t cut the thing off before they started the IV, then added, “Gimme your bandage scissors,” as she hooked a finger under the kerchief.

Without warning, the patient’s other hand snapped up and seized Danni’s wrist.

“Leave it alone,” he growled in a deep bass voice that sounded hoarse and dry. The oxygen mask fogged with his breath, but nothing else about him moved. His grip on Danni’s wrist, though, was like an iron band. His fingers felt hot, and Danni made a mental note to recheck his temp and then briefly wondered if it was her fatigue, her hunger, or what, that was making her suddenly weak.

“Mr. Creed,” she said as she peeled his fingers from her flesh. “I need to get this thing off so I can evaluate you properly.” She pulled on the bandanna, but he jerked his arm out of her reach. For an injured man, his reflexes were certainly quick.

He raised his head, opened bright-blue eyes and frowned at her. “I said, it stays where it is.”

Something about his gaze made Danni swallow. “Of course,” she answered softly.

His eyes slid closed, and he laid his head back, groaning in that deep voice that made Danni’s heart beat faster. Then he lowered his chin and looked down his long frame toward the door of the tiny room. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the emergency room at Holy Cross Hospital.”

“Oh, yeah? You a nurse?”

“No. I’m Dr. Dann...Dr. Goodlove. I gave you a sedative earlier.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I did. Right now I’m going to stitch up that laceration you have there.”

He glanced at his arm, then groaned, “Have at it,” in his wonderful voice, and laid his good arm across his eyes.

Carol gently rearranged the IV to accommodate his position.

“Did those kids make it?” he asked.

Danni felt her heart constrict because, even through the mask, she could see his wide, handsome mouth tighten and pull down at the corners, betraying the emotion he was holding back.

She had to swallow before she spoke. “Yes,” she said, although she feared that by now they had not. “And the mother’s upstairs in maternity. She’s fine.”

“She’s pregnant?” He moved the arm and stared, unbelieving, into Danni’s eyes.

“Not anymore. I delivered her preemie by C-section.”

“Damn,” he said quietly and closed his eyes.

“The baby’s okay. Let’s tend to you, now.” Danni forced herself to sound calm, professional. She leaned over him and placed a stethoscope on his chest, moving it periodically as she listened. “Lungs sound clear,” she said to Carol.

She moved the stethoscope to crucial points over his heart and concentrated. The beat was regular, but rapid. Stress maybe.

She glanced into his face. He was watching her like—Well, she didn’t know like what. It was eerie, looking into those steady blue eyes while listening to his strong heartbeat.

She finished, pulled the stethoscope from her ears, and straightened. “Okay. Let’s fix your arm.”

Danni rolled a stool up beside the gurney, and while the patient watched them with drugged-sleepy detachment, Carol treated the bums and Danni checked the gash for foreign bodies, then started carefully stitching it up.

As Danni worked, she waited for his reaction to the painful things she was doing to him. He never once flinched. But every time she glanced into his blue eyes, she wished she hadn’t. They sent a quiver through her, threatening to dissolve her professional armor.