by Jadyn Chase
I floundered for some other way to get through to him. “You’re Roman, aren’t you? Roman Santiago.”
His head whipped around fast. “That’s right. I’m her father.”
“The doctors aren’t scheduled to visit her again until the morning. Why don’t you come out for a while and take a break? You can’t do anything more in here. She might sleep all night. You need to rest, too.”
He shook his head. “I can’t leave. I want to be here when she wakes up.”
“You won’t be any good to her if you collapse from exhaustion.” I scanned the group. None of them would look at me or listen to a word I said. They all just stared at the little girl.
I never expected men like that to care so much about one little girl. I could believe it of her father, but these are patched gang members. Anybody could see that. They displayed their status in plain view. They made no attempt to hide it, but they obviously cared deeply for this little girl. I didn’t see this kind of concern often. Sometimes a child’s own parents didn’t give much of a shit that they got hurt or sick.
Without thinking, I touched Roman’s arm. “Come on. I’ll take you down to the cafeteria and buy you a cup of coffee. You’ll need it if you plan to sit up all night with her.”
His head spun around at the touch. His eyes flashed. For a minute, I feared he might break me in half with those meat hooks at the end of his arms. The next moment, he breathed a broken sigh and bowed his head. “Okay. You talked me into it.”
The four of them meandered out of the room. Roman murmured a few hasty words to one of them. The guy’s jacket badge read, El Capitán. The man nodded, and all three walked away. They strode shoulder to shoulder to take up the whole ward.
I couldn’t help but shudder after they left. Roman cocked his head to examine me. Then his eyes flickered down to my name tag. “Maya. Maya Christiansen, RN.”
I broke into a nervous laugh. “That’s me.”
He waited, but he didn’t smile. “So…are you buying me a cup of coffee?”
“Yes!” I jumped a foot in the air. “Of course. Come on.”
We set off down the hall toward the stairs. I could have been walking next to any concerned parent, but somehow this man gave me a fluttery feeling in my middle. He dwarfed me by several inches, both in height and with his broad shoulders.
Not only that, his clothes attracted more attention than made me comfortable. Was every other staff member on the Pediatrics ward staring at us? I sure felt that way.
What was I thinking asking him to coffee, anyway? I shouldn’t have gotten involved with a patient’s family, much less a member of a notorious gang. If this turned against me, I could find myself in real danger. Christ, he might even blame me if anything went wrong with his daughter. That would be my worst nightmare.
At the end of the ward, he marched forward and slammed open the door to the stairwell. He stood back to let me go through it first. I stole a glance at his chiseled, sun-browned face with the powerful cheekbones and straight, strong nose. Was he trying to be chivalrous? That would be a joke coming from a guy like him, but he didn’t show any change of expression. He acted like this was the done thing.
I churned in a turmoil of impressions all the way to the cafeteria. He got his own coffee, and I paid for it at the register. Now what was I supposed to do—abandon him here? I made my way to a table and sat down. He took a seat opposite me and sipped his drink. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied. “I hope Anna makes a full recovery.”
“I just don’t understand it.” He rotated his paper cup on the table. “One minute she was smiling and talking and having a tea party with her stuffed animals. The next minute, she keeled over having a seizure. Just like that.”
He snapped his thick fingers. The sound echoed through the vacant cafeteria. It startled me even though I saw it coming. I had plenty of time between when he raised his hand, compressed his thumb and middle finger, and when the sound hit my eardrum. For some reason, though, I stiffened to protect myself from it.
Did he see? His sharp eyes caught the slightest fluctuation in expression. Maybe that was why he snapped his fingers, to see how I would react.
I took a firm grip on myself. I was sitting across from him while he drank a cup of coffee. I was sitting across from him because I invited him here. He wasn’t going to kill me in a hospital cafeteria. He was just a worried father like any other.
“Anna’s chart says you’re her primary caregiver. Where’s her mother?” Don’t ask me why I asked that. I should have had my head examined. I was sure a guy like Roman Santiago wouldn’t appreciate a nurse interrogating him.
He didn’t bat an eyelash. “She’s dead. I’ve been raising Anna alone since she was a baby.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I shouldn’t ask such personal questions. I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on.”
“I don’t mind. Her name was Laura. She was shot in the head during a drive-by shooting. That’s why I cut my hair. Anna came home from the hospital a week before Laura died. I was left alone to take care of a newborn baby. She was all I had to keep me going. I had to do it, so you can understand why I don’t want to lose her now, especially to something I don’t even understand.”
My shoulders slumped in relief. He really was just a regular human being even if he did look like a monster. “I understand. I wish modern medicine had all the answers, but I have to warn you. It’s possible and even likely that they won’t find any cause for the seizure. She might never have another one and go on to live a perfectly normal life.”
His head shot up and his eyebrows arched. I didn’t know what I said to set him off, but I froze for a second until he relaxed and bent over his coffee again.
“If they don’t find a cause, they’ll send her home,” I went on. “It’s possible she could have another seizure later in her life. Sometimes long-term epileptics discover their condition this way. They just have to keep having unexplained seizures until the doctors figure out what’s causing them. That’s the only way they can decide how to treat it—by tracking the commonalities from one seizure to another.”
“That’s a hell of a way to conduct the practice of medicine,” he snarled. “It would be better if they could just scan her brain and figure out what caused it.”
“I know.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. I had to tread carefully here. “The problem is that the seizure stopped before they brought her in. Her brain was already reverting to its normal state. They would have to scan her while the seizure was going on, and there’s almost no way to predict when that will be.”
He bolted back the rest of his coffee and crushed the cup in one giant fist. “I realize all that, but it doesn’t exactly give me any peace of mind, you know? How am I supposed to live like that?”
“You have to understand,” I tell him, “even if Anna does turn out to be a life-long epileptic—which there’s no reason to believe she will be—she can still lead a normal life. They’ll put her on some medication that will suppress the seizures. The rest of the time, she’ll be a little girl like all the other little girls in the world. She’ll keep having tea parties and play dates with her friends. She’ll go through school and go to college—”
I stopped with my mouth open. I stared at him in horror. Did I just shoot myself in the foot saying that? How did I know he wanted her to go to college? Maybe he wanted her to become a gang member like himself.
He cocked his head. “Yeah? She’ll go through school and go to college and what? What were you about to say?”
I hauled my brain into action mode. “I only meant, she’ll have a normal life. Lots of people live with epilepsy. It doesn’t stop them from having full, meaningful, and productive lives. There’s no reason to believe it will prevent her from doing that. That’s all I’m saying.”
His shoulders hunched. When he sighed, I hardly believed I was looking at the same man. “Thank you. That’s what I really need to hear right now.”
“It’s going to be all right.” One more time, my instincts got away from me and I put out my hand to touch his. The instant it happened, a jolt of surprise raced up my arm. I couldn’t call it fear or danger. The sudden power of my skin making contact with him took me back.
For one Earth-shattering instant, I stared into the black pits of his eyes. Those deep pools possessed no bottom. They plummeted into oblivion and kept on going into eternity.
He didn’t move. He made no attempt to pull away or to break that contact. What was he thinking? Was he cursing me for infringing on his space? Did I transgress some cultural taboo by touching a man I didn’t even know?
At that moment, someone in the kitchen behind me dropped a stack of plates. They smashed with an ear-splitting shatter of sound that made me start out of my skin. I spun around, but when I didn’t see anything, I jerked the other way and came face to face with Roman again.
“It’s all right.” His voice seemed soft and soothing all of a sudden. “It’s nothing.”
I groped around for a way to change the subject. I pointed at his vest. “The Boss. Is that what you are?”
He dipped his chin once. “That’s me. I’m the boss. I give the orders.”
My mind flashed back to the room. “To those men in there? Who are they?”
“They’re just my hombres. We protect each other and defend our territory. It’s my job to make sure everything gets done, and nothing gets forgotten.”
“That sounds like a lot of responsibility,” I remarked.
“Not as much responsibility as raising a child.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I lowered my gaze to the tabletop. When I did, my eye fell on his bare forearm lying across the surface. A large tattoo of a wheel covered the bulging muscle and the veins undulating over the bone. A wicked-looking dragon coiled around the wheel. Flames snaked out of its back and surrounded a rippling banner with the words, Los Diablos, curling in majestic italics.
“And this?” I traced my fingertip over the dragon’s sinuous form. “Is this your responsibility, too?”
He didn’t answer for so long that I looked up to find his sharp eyes boring into my very soul. His granite features riveted in a mask of…. something unidentifiable. It made my heart quail, but not in fear.
Out of the fog of chaos and overwhelming intensity, I became aware of what I was doing. My fingertip still trailed along the black outline of that serpentine image etched into his flesh. A spark shot from him to me and made me pull my hand back.
I blushed and lowered my eyes to the table. “I guess it’s none of my business. We should probably get back upstairs and see how Anna is doing.”
He didn’t rocket out of his seat to get away from me. His stony gaze held me enthralled for a fraction of a second before he slid his chair back. He took his time getting to his feet and he let me lead the way out of the cafeteria.
We climbed back up to the ward in silence. We walked along the corridor without saying a word, but somehow everything changed in the space of a few minutes. When people glanced up from their work stations to watch us pass, their eyes gave me a sinking sensation in my guts.
What happened? I couldn’t define it. So I touched him. Why should that make such a difference? I touched people all day long. I patted their hands and helped them sit up and cleaned their wounds. I did a lot more intimate things than touch their arms for a few seconds.
Yet, in spite of all that, touching him changed things. He ceased to be a father of a child patient of mine. He ceased even to be a biker from the wrong side of town.
He became a man. I didn’t even see the vest or the bandana anymore. I saw only him.
3
Roman
Maya pushed open Anna’s door and gasped. I took a few more steps before I saw my little girl sitting up in bed. Her black hair tumbled around her bright face and her eyes popped open. “Papa!”
I rushed to her side and crushed her to my heart. “Anna! Thank God you’re all right. You don’t know how worried I was about you. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up. I wanted to be. I just stepped out for a cup of coffee. I thought I was going to have to sit up all night keeping watch over you, but you look perfectly all right now.”
Maya spoke up behind me. “What did I tell you?”
I turned around to face her. “Thank you. You really put my mind at rest. Now I see everything’s going to be all right.”
Maya beamed down at Anna. “It was the least I could do.”
She moved to the foot of the bed and started scribbling in Anna’s chart. I concentrated on my daughter, but my awareness kept drifting back to Maya. It was funny, now that I thought about it. A few minutes ago, nothing in the world could drag my eyes away from that little face. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about someone else.
“What happened to me, Papa?” Anna drew my focus back to her. She always did. “I can’t remember anything after I came home from school.”
“You don’t?” I frowned. “You don’t remember the tea party or the poppyseed cake or the…..?”
Maya chimed in from the end of the bed. “That’s not unusual. Sometimes seizures can cause memory lapses.” She shifted around the bed and laid her hand on Anna’s wrist. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You had a seizure. Do you know what that is? It’s like a hiccup for your brain. You were playing with your dad, and you fell over. The ambulance brought you in here so the doctors could take a look at you and try to figure out what happened, but you’re all right now. As soon as they see you in the morning, I’m sure they’ll send you home.”
Anna stared up at her with wide eyes. She drank in all that information with both ears. “Wow. How did you learn all that?”
Maya blushed and slid her pen into her pocket. “I went to nursing school. That’s all. You could be a nurse if you wanted to someday.”
“That would be awesome!” Anna exclaimed. “Or better yet, I could be a doctor! I could do it, you know. I could go to college and become a doctor. Do you think so?”
Maya cast a glance at me. All at once, she made me uncomfortable. Why? Could Anna see what happened between Maya and me? How could she when nothing happened? We sat across from each other in the cafeteria. I drank a cup of coffee and we talked. That was all. She asked me about my tat and the Boss patch on my vest. Nothing more.
Still, I couldn’t escape the creeping feeling I should hide it all from Anna. I didn’t want her to find out, like I did something I was worried would get me into trouble. Isn’t that stupid?
Maya beamed down at Anna. “I think that’s a great idea. If you want to go to college and become a doctor, you should definitely do it. I can see you’re smart enough and I’ll bet your dad would be supportive, too.”
“Of course, sweetie,” I murmured. “Of course you should go to college to become a doctor if that’s what you want.”
“Really, Papa?” Anna cried. “Could I really?”
I bent down and kissed her on the head. “You would be the first person in our family to go to college. I would be so proud.”
Even before I got a chance to stand up, Maya cut in again. “Hey, you two should spend some time together. I’ll take off, but I’ll see you later to check in on you, Anna. Just don’t keep her up too late, okay, Roman? She’s going to get tired easily over the next few days.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Maya squeezed Anna’s arm one more time. “Try to get some sleep, okay? See you later.”
She breezed out of the room. I glanced over my shoulder when she left, but something about her presence made me fidget. The room seemed empty and lifeless without her in it. For the first time in seven years, Anna wasn’t enough to keep me occupied.
I rotated around to find Anna studying me. Her eyes sparkled and a hint of childish mirth tugged the corners of her mouth.
I looked away before I could meet her gaze. “What?”
Anna tossed her little head. “She’s nice.”
“Yes, she’s nice. She’l
l take good care of you.”
Anna’s unflinching stare refused to let me look away. “She called you Roman.”
“So?” I did my best to square my shoulders, but it didn’t work out too well. What man in his right mind would square his shoulders at his own daughter? “That’s my name, isn’t it?”
She fiddled with the blanket covering her body. I took the opportunity to sit down in a chair nearby. “She said you should try to get some sleep and I’m not supposed to keep you up too late. I’ll stay with you sweetie, but you need your rest.”
She dutifully reclined back on the pillow and let the subject drop, but I found my gaze drifting toward the door. How many times did my mind conjure up the image of her—not my Anna as it did so often since her mother died, but Maya.
Her white-blonde hair cascaded over her blue scrubs. Her sea-green eyes revealed the radiating fibers of her irises. Her vibrant skin shone to brighten this dreary, institutional place.
A thousand times in that interminable night, I relived the moment when her fingertip dragged across the skin on my arm. She touched my tattoo, but she didn’t really notice that. She touched something deeper that I thought I’d lost forever.
It turned out I didn’t lose it. I just walled it off after Laura died so I wouldn’t feel it. I blocked out the possibility that anyone could make me feel anything ever again. I turned deadly and unwavering in conducting my business and my responsibilities to the club. Nothing else mattered.
I convinced myself I would never take another woman. Now this pale nurse from another world thrust herself into my path. She didn’t, though. She was just being nice because I was worried about Anna.
In actual fact, Destiny itself thrust her into my path. That was what I felt when she touched me. First, she touched my hand. Then she touched my arm. That was the touch of Destiny.
I felt it the instant it happened. A thunderclap went off in my head, and everything changed. I might fight against it. I might walk out of here and never see her again, but I couldn’t deny that it happened.
