by Annie O'Neil
“Precisely.” He heaved a sigh of relief, only to catch the unchecked roll of Saoirse’s eyes. He’d bought himself a bit more time. Time to set things right. For all of them.
“For the record...” Saoirse crossed to him and gave him a narrow-eyed stare “...men are stupid.” She zeroed her pointy finger in on his chest and gave him a much-deserved jab in the solar plexus. “Enjoy the guest room, muchacho.”
CHAPTER TEN
SAOIRSE CLIMBED OUT of the ambulance feeling like cement was setting in her bloodstream. Another day of pretending. Another day of hiding the fact the very fabric of her well-being was being torn apart the further Santi drifted away from their little cocoon of 24/7 togetherness.
Stocktaking with the brothers. Dinner with the brothers. Stopping in for a chat with the brothers. A nosy around the fancy clinic to see how far they had all come.
If she could just meet the blighters she wouldn’t care! It was everything Santi had wanted and her heart was soaring for him. With him. But being held at a very obvious distance was taking its toll. Especially with the rapidly approaching courthouse date. This was her future after all.
And his?
Well. He was finally getting what he’d come home for. Closure. Peace. Family.
And the fact she didn’t factor into any of it was becoming clearer by the second. It didn’t stop her from wanting to fight it, though. Didn’t stop her from knowing she’d met The One.
She pulled open the back door of the ambulance and raked around for the cleaning supplies.
“Are you coming back tonight? For dinner?” Saoirse feigned utter disinterest in Santi’s answer, but when she didn’t even get one she chalked the moment up on her growing list of lovelorn-wife moments. Even she hated the sound of her own voice when she sounded all fake cheery.
When they’d kicked this whole thing off? She’d swept away a mountain’s worth of concerns. They’d had fun! They’d had sex! They’d worked together and been brilliant because whenever they’d done anything together it had been better!
Those together moments were dropping like flies.
It was now glaringly obvious that Santi’s offer of marriage was just what he’d said: a favor. Something to keep him in Miami until he was drawn back into the bosom of the Valentino clan.
Or...hard chest.
Or...whatever it was four brothers did whenever they made peace.
Eat buckets of Helibanas and leave their fake fiancées in the wake of their happy-families parade?
It was looking that way.
Her whole swooping-heart, pitter-pat, pulse-racing thing was just a problem she’d have to sort out on her lonesome.
She stopped her frantic scrubbing of the ambulance door and turned to face a freshly materialized Santi, who was looking at her curiously. He’d been doing it more and more over the past few weeks.
Weeks racing past so fast she could practically hear them taunting her.
Her visa was painfully close to expiring. The unspoken-of wedding was a looming issue on the horizon, no longer the brightly glowing thing she’d been anticipating.
Work had become her go-to companion. She’d used every excuse in the book to rack up extra shifts. Needing a new race suit, needing a new carburetor. Needing an engine rebuild. Suffice it to say her car was taking a pounding on the racetrack these days.
She turned around to see his eyes still solidly locked on her. Paranoia was beginning to set in. Sure, she’d put on a couple of pounds over the past few weeks but that had been comfort eating. Completely understandable considering the circumstances.
“What are you staring at? Haven’t you any work to be getting on with?” She shooed him away, quickly going up on tiptoe, trying to check out her reflection in the ambulance window to see if something was smeared on her face. The day had been a particularly messy one and all she wanted right now was a hot shower. She scrubbed at her face even though she saw nothing, and looked back toward Santi.
He was leaning against the ambulance with his legs crossed as he filled out the mileage log. It shouldn’t look as sexy as it did, but the pose never failed to make him look like Mr. January straight through to December.
A hot shower with a certain someone might make scrubbing off the day even more pleasant to look forward to.
“No, sorry.” He scuffed his boot against the tarmac and looked back up at her. “Previous plans.”
“Oh, cool.” She plastered on her I’m-so-happy-to-hear-it smile. “Big night out with your brothers?”
“No, not tonight.” His eyes met hers with that electric burst of connection. The one that felt as if he’d hit her with starbursts and moonbeams and anything else romantic the world had on offer.
He threw a coin up into the air, caught it and slapped it down on the back of his hand as if he were playing heads or tails with himself. His face lit up with a huge smile. One so sweet it near enough tore her heart from her chest.
“...and so they said we’d get together for a football game or something.”
“Sorry? What was that?” She’d been staring at his mouth and not listening to the words again. “You mean soccer?”
“No, American football, you doofus.” He crossed over to the ambulance, threw the clipboard he’d been filling in onto the gurney then crooked his elbow around her neck and gave her one of those goofy knuckle-rubs on her head. The kind you’d give a brother...or a little sister. Two months ago? Perfect. Now? It felt like she was being downgraded.
What a difference a reconciliation with your family could make.
“Ah, Murph, good times, eh? It’s been great catching up with them. Like I’ve become whole again.”
She watched as he drifted away to that faraway place she’d seen him revisit again and again over the past few weeks before remembering he was in midconversation. “You’d love them,” he tacked on, a shot of panic in his amber-flecked eyes making the Great Unsaid of the whole exchange come through loud and clear.
“All it takes is an invitation!”
Take that, you unwitting heartbreaker.
“Thanks, Miss Manners. Got it.” He tapped his head as if storing away a great tip for folding napkins at his next formal dinner party. In other words, straight into the mental garbage can.
She turned away, fighting the painful sting of tears.
She wasn’t going to meet them. Not unless she suddenly needed a neurosurgeon, an epidemiologist and a pediatric-transplant surgeon all at once.
And yet?
None of this was sitting right. Santi didn’t give panicky glances. He was all male. A macho, muscled-up hombre with a take-no-prisoners smile. He looked like a poster boy for the Marines he had so recently belonged to. Throw away the gun, toss in a stethoscope and boom! Santiago Valentino. She snuck a peek at him, her scrubbing arm coming to a slow halt as she did.
She gave her shoulders a shake and started scrubbing again. Hard.
“So, um...” Santi began with an uncharacteristic absence of speaking skills.
She took a stab in the dark at what he was trying to say. “Catch you later?”
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe we’ll grab a bite if I get back in time?” He gave her a weird, halfhearted pat on the back, a distracted peck on the cheek—one you’d give your grandmother—and wandered off, lost in the deepest of thought.
She grabbed hold of the door and sank onto the thick lip of the ambulance’s bumper as a sour cramping sensation rushed into her gut so violently she gasped.
He wanted out.
Now that he had his brothers in his life again—brothers he had fastidiously avoided introducing her to—he didn’t need to do good deeds anymore.
“Hey, Valentino!” she shouted after his retreating figure, hands pressed to her knees in a facsimile of looking good, feeling good. “Don’t worr
y about dinner. I think I’m going to try and grab another shift. I heard they’re short tonight.”
“Oh! All right.” He nodded as if really taking the news on board and finding it difficult to digest. “Good. Good. See you later, then.”
“Santi?” she called out again.
When he turned around the look of hope and expectation on his face all but took her breath away.
Those eyes of his, amber-flecked portals to all the answers of the universe. His beautiful mouth, lips slightly parted as if he were about to ask her a question. That dark hair she’d become addicted to running her fingers through could’ve done with a bit of a tweak right now. Not that devilishly rakish didn’t work for the man. Far from it. She felt a small tremor begin to take hold of her fingers, spreading and gaining traction throughout her body. The sum of this man’s parts was now adding up to one terrifying reality: she was in trouble. And in the one way she’d vowed never to get hurt again.
“Drive safe.”
It came out as more of a whisper than the cheery goodbye she’d been aiming for.
“Will do.” Santi gave her a half wave and, if she wasn’t mistaken, a confused shake of the head as he turned and picked up his long-legged stride toward his motorcycle.
The physical ache she felt as she watched him leave threatened to consume her on the spot. Head down, shoulders tightly hunched up toward her ears so that they all but blocked out the roar of Santi’s motorcycle being shifted from low to high gear as he swept out of Seaside Hospital’s parking lot and off into the glowing remains of the evening light.
An emptiness began to fill her like darkness.
She shook her head again and again. She hadn’t traveled this far and worked as hard as she had only to become a victim again.
This time she was in charge of her destiny.
This time she held the reins.
* * *
It was worth it. At least it would be. Wearing the emotional flak jacket to stave off Saoirse’s death glares and poorly disguised disappointment in him.
He knew he was being protective of her meeting his brothers. But not for the reasons she thought.
The number of times he’d thought of telling them about her...he just couldn’t pick where to begin when they were still working their way around their newfound relationships.
“So...there’s this girl I met...”
“Funny thing happened at work the other day.”
“What do you get when you put an Irish paramedic and a Heliconian Marine in a courthouse?”
An arranged marriage!
It wasn’t funny. And it certainly wasn’t a joke.
A tug at his conscience reminded him of the streak of sadness in Saoirse’s voice when he’d left tonight.
He’d caused that. And he’d be the one to fix it. Turn her frown upside down.
Dios!
What a dork.
He opened the throttle on his bike just to remind himself of his own virility.
Taking the turn into town instead of off to the Keys was equally satisfying.
He was putting down roots. Building a new future.
All that was left to discover was how big a role Saoirse was going to play in it.
* * *
“Hey! Where’s the fire?”
“Amanda! Sorry, I didn’t see you there.” Saoirse’s focus had been so intent she’d marched straight past her friend. “You off shift?”
“Yeah, how did you guess?” Her friend gave her trademark smirk as she retied the bikini neck strings looping over the back of her baggy sweatshirt.
“Meeting James at the beach?”
“And the observational powers prize goes to Saoirse Murphy!”
Saoirse’s jaw dropped.
“What? What did I say?” Amanda looked over her shoulder as if the words were still lingering there.
“You got it right.”
“What right?”
“My name. It’s the first time you’ve got my name right!”
“Really?” Amanda beamed. “I wasn’t even trying! Hooray for me!” She grabbed hold of Saoirse’s elbow with both hands and tugged. “Why don’t you come along? We’ll have a swim, and then we’ll ditch James. He’s always working at night anyway so we can go to Mad Ron’s and drink mojitos.”
A wave of nausea lurched across Saoirse’s midriff. She’d been giving Mad Ron’s a wide berth since “the reunion.”
“What’s wrong?” Amanda’s forehead crinkled. “You love Mad Ron’s and we haven’t been for ages.”
“I know, I was just...” Oh, no. Oh, please...oh, please, no. Tears were stinging at the back of her throat. She held her breath. She swallowed. She held her breath again.
“Oh, Murph! C’mon. I have a good guess where you were heading so let’s get there and fast.” Amanda steered her around past the main check-in counter and headed toward the elevators, proving she knew her friend well.
“What about James?”
Her voice cracked horribly and the tears she’d been valiantly holding at bay lurched up to balance precariously on the rims of her eyes.
You idiot! Tip your head back. Tip your head back and make them go away.
“I’ll send him a text. He never actually wants to go, but I make him because otherwise I don’t think he’d ever leave the office. Enforced date night,” she added, all the while jabbing the elevator buttons. “All work and no play makes James a dull boy.”
Mercifully, the doors opened to an empty elevator and Saoirse felt herself being shuttled in as the film of tears grew thicker and thicker by the moment.
“No!” Amanda put out her hand to stop a family carrying fistfuls of balloons and armfuls of flowers from entering the elevator. “Sorry! Medical emergency, this one’s taken.”
Saoirse opened her mouth to protest, but in so doing lost her battle with the tears she’d been trying to hold at bay.
“Right!” Amanda tugged a tissue out of her never-ending stash and scrubbed at her friend’s face as if she were a toddler. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Saoirse mumble-sniffed.
I’m in love with Santiago and it’s never going to happen!
“It’s Santiago, isn’t it? Are you in love with him?”
“How—”
“It’s only been written all over your doe-eyed face for the past few weeks, Murphy.”
“You have permission to say my name now.” Saoirse tried to smile through her tears and ended up doing a weird hiccup thing instead.
“I’m not going to risk it.” Amanda nodded seriously, clearing a path through the crowd waiting outside the third-floor elevator bay. “There’s only so much damage control a girl can do. Take a right here.”
Saoirse nodded, even though she didn’t need directions. This was the first place she’d visited when choosing which hospital she wanted to work for. A visual reminder of where she didn’t want to find herself in another year’s time. But as the familiar sights and sounds of the department began to hit her she wondered if perhaps she hadn’t been a bit hasty.
The soft lighting, the hushed tones, deeply cushioned armchairs, monitors everywhere. The whirr and steady cadence of lifesaving equipment all wove together into the core ingredients of the department where she’d begun her medical career.
A complication of emotions started crisscrossing her heart as she pressed her face up against the window of the NICU’s main hub—a fan of incubators spread out before her in a room with all the equipment an infant fighting for survival could need. A few more tears rolled down her cheeks before she felt she was ready to turn the handle and enter.
The familiar scents hit her with unexpected strength. It shouldn’t have surprised her—scent being one of the most evocative of sen
sations—but she felt her body being infused with all that she had left behind. She took a deep breath and walked straight into the middle of the room before allowing herself to take it all in. Amanda waited at the doorway of the midsize room, knowing more than Saoirse did herself that alone time with all the tiny babies in NICU was going to be the healing elixir she needed right now.
The details of why each child was there came to her before she read their charts. It had always been a point of pride back in Ireland—the connection she’d instantly shared with the newborn souls fighting for the lives they were meant to lead. A daughter’s heart that needed a bit more time to grow. A transfusion for a son who needed a boost of red blood cells. Twins whose blood types were mysteriously incompatible with their mother’s, overwhelming their tiny little livers, giving their soft skin a jaundiced taint. All of them united in their efforts to survive.
This world was so familiar to her she probably could have gone through it blindfolded. But then you didn’t get the plus side of seeing all the tiny fingers and tiny toes...little rosebud mouths and noses just begging for a kiss to be popped onto them.
A sigh left her as she realized it had only been some nine months ago that she’d thought the last place on earth she’d find comfort was the NICU and yet...in the time it took a baby to gestate...
Was she really back where she’d begun this journey? Heartbroken and alone?
She ran her fingers along the incubator closest to her and had to smile. Another set of twins. Cheek to cheek and holding hands. They couldn’t have been more than a kilo each. Fragile and resilient. That’s what these little ones were. She could sense it in the connection they shared with each other as they slept, their bodies unconsciously doing everything they could to stay alive. The medical teams who cared for them—quietly, and with dogged determination—doing the same.
Tiny oxygen tubes were taped—pink for one, blue for the other—along their miniature upper lips. She scanned their charts.
RDS. Respiratory distress syndrome often afflicted preemies, landing them in the NICU for C-PAP treatment. The air they received from the thin oxygen tubes helped keep the small air sacs in their lungs from collapsing. It was a good sign that they had the nose tubes. Some of the sickest children needed mechanical ventilators to breathe for them while their lungs strengthened and recovered. Fighters. The lot of them.
