Winter Soldier (Mills & Boon Vintage Superromance)

by Marisa Carroll

  Adam hefted the emergency case. into the back of the Cherokee. “Twins as a symbol of new beginnings.” Adam paused and looked briefly at Leah. Then he changed the subject. “Anything else you need?” he asked as she opened the passenger-side door.

  “No, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Leah said casually. She wanted to get under way. New beginnings... Sometimes Adam said things that made her think he understood what she was going through more than she thought he did—and more than she wanted him to.

  Adam closed the door for her, and then climbed in behind the wheel. He nosed the Cherokee into her driveway to turn around and headed toward the hospital. Five minutes later he pulled into the parking space with her name on it and switched off the ignition. The clinic opened at nine, so there was plenty of time for her to make her announcement and let everyone get over the excitement before the first patients arrived.

  Clint Fackler’s bicycle was in its accustomed spot beside the picnic table under the sycamore tree, where they all ate lunch on warm summer days. Clint was a nurse practitioner, a certified nurse/midwife associated with the ob/gyn practice on the second floor. Leah had already decided to ask him to deliver her baby.

  Would Adam want to be with her for the baby’s birth? she wondered. How was she going to deal with that when the time came?

  Dessie Palmer, the receptionist, was just unlocking the back door. She gave Adam and the Cherokee the once-over, waved to Leah and went inside. Leah felt a twinge of unease. She couldn’t help it. Dessie was a sweet person, but she was also the biggest gossip in Slate Hollow. Word of her pregnancy would be all over town by afternoon.

  Well, that’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Call out the town crier and get the word on the street. Leah Gentry is pregnant and she isn’t going to marry the father of the baby. Nerves made her next words a little short.

  “Let’s get it over with,” she said.

  “KEEPING BUSY?” Caleb asked as he came through the door of the clinic’s small staff lounge where Adam was looking at the architectural drawing of a proposed addition to the building pinned to the wall.

  “I’m managing to keep myself occupied,” Adam told him.

  “I see you’ve found my wish list,” Caleb observed, as he poured himself a cup of coffee. He walked over to where Adam was standing. “Two new operating rooms, an outpatient surgery suite, a new radiology department, and office space and exam rooms for four new visiting specialists. We won’t have to send our cardiology, oncology or neuro patients to Lexington anymore unless it’s an emergency.”

  “What will that bring your bed capacity up to?”

  “Seventy-five,” Caleb replied.

  “Do you already have people on board to fill the specialty openings?”

  “The bond levy’ll be on the fall ballot. I can’t do anything officially until it passes of course, but I’ve been shopping around. We’ll move our own oncology and ob/gyn people in. We’ve got a dermatologist planning to come once a week, and we can make room for her here.” He jabbed a finger at the drawing. “As you could probably tell by the wall-to-wall people in here this morning, we’re bursting at the seams.”

  Adam had noticed, even though he’d spent most of the morning shut in Caleb’s office playing solitaire on his computer or staring out the window at the kids on their way to school across the street, all the while listening for the sound of Leah’s voice, her laughter, as she went about her work. Caleb went right on talking, undeterred by his silence.

  “This building was made for four doctors. We’ve got six crammed in here now, not counting our nurse practitioners.”

  Adam gestured toward the plans with his coffee mug. “What are these rooms for?”

  “Cardiologists in this one, and a neurosurgeon. We’re trying to coax Peter Assad here from Lex General.”

  “I’m familiar with his articles. He’s a good man,” Adam said, and felt an unexpected pinch of envy. He could almost imagine himself working in a place like this—except for one thing. He would have to deal directly with patients again, one to one, without the buffering layers of hospital bureaucracy that shielded him from too much contact with the human beings he cut and stitched on the operating table.

  “I’d like you to meet him someday. How long do you plan to stay around?”

  “A few more days at least. I don’t want to leave until I’m sure Leah’s blood pressure is completely under control.” He couldn’t stay away from St. B’s indefinitely, not if he wanted to stay on the fast track there.

  “Another trip, then,” Caleb said, as though there was no question Adam would be spending time in Slate Hollow in the future. “Assad’s not certain he wants to leave the city, though. It’s pretty routine work we do here. None of the fancy stuff he’s used to. I imagine you’d feel the same way about leaving St. B’s. But the whole thing’s a moot point if we don’t get the money.” Caleb’s pager went off. “It’s the ER. Excuse me,” he said, and walked over to the telephone on the wall.

  Adam turned his attention from the drawing to the rest of the homey, cluttered room. Snapshots of staff members and their families were pinned to a corkboard above a round table. He wandered over to look at them. There was one of Clint Fackler, the nurse/ midwife he’d met earlier before he headed off to the birthing suites. He had shaken Adam’s hand and promised to give Leah and the baby the best possible care. There was one of Dessie Palmer, the receptionist, who had squealed with joy and hugged Leah until she was breathless. But all the while she was making a fuss, there was a gleam in her pale blue eyes that made him think it wouldn’t be long before the news of Leah’s pregnancy was all over town. A moment later he’d caught Leah’s slightly rueful expression and deduced that her thoughts mirrored his own.

  Still, as she predicted, no one had reacted with disgust or disapproval. Leah’s co-workers were also her friends, and they’d greeted her announcement with surprise and happiness. There were a couple of good-natured hints that they’d noticed she had put on a pound or two, but never would any of them have guessed she was pregnant. With him they had been polite and friendly, if reserved. He’d expected nothing more.

  His eyes skimmed over most of the other pictures, but the ones of Leah caught and held his attention. There was one of her sitting on the running board of a jeep, with the two baby goats she’d told him about that morning and a group of heartbreakingly thin Somali children crowded around her. The children were smiling, probably without hunger pangs for the first time in their lives. Nearby was another picture of Leah in the snow and mud of Bosnia. Again she was surrounded by children, this time wrapped in scarves and mittens, and again they were all smiling, clearly as delighted to be with Leah as she appeared to be with them.

  Looking at those snapshots of Leah in uniform, he realized they shared something they had never talked about—an intimacy with the horrors of war. But unlike him, Leah seemed fortunate enough to have emerged unscathed.

  There were yet more pictures of the mother of his child scattered around the corkboard. One taken at what appeared to be a clinic picnic, one at Halloween with Leah dressed up in a witch’s cape and pointy hat, passing out treats. Always there were children with her. She obviously was drawn to the little ones, and they to her. He had never been that natural and carefree with children, not since the day he had strapped all those small, trusting souls into the seats of the C-5A and sent them off to die....

  Caleb’s voice pulled him from his musings. “Got a patient they sent from the satellite clinic at Cade’s Crossing in the ER. Severe arm and shoulder pain and no discernible cause. Want to join me and have a look at her?”

  “I’m not licensed to practice in Kentucky,” Adam hedged. It had been a long time since he’d walked into an ER exam room to see a patient. Things didn’t work that way at St. Barnabas when you were next in line for head of a department. It was rare if he saw a patient at all between his initial office consultation and the operating room. All the interaction of routine exams and paperwork were done by
interns and residents.

  “Hell, I’m not asking you to operate on the woman. I’d just like your opinion of what might be causing her pain,” Caleb said in his blunt way.

  “Sure, I’d be glad to,” Adam lied.

  Caleb grabbed a lab coat off a hook by the door and handed it to him. “Might as well look the part, Sauder. It’s not often I get to haul a hotshot headcracker around with me.”

  Adam slipped on the coat and followed him out the door and through the entryway connecting the clinic to the hospital. Less than a minute after they left the staff lounge they were being briefed on Caleb’s patient by a dour-faced ER nurse.

  “Her name’s Caroline Stead. She’s in two. She’s complaining of severe left-arm pain that’s been going on for about ten days. The attending doctor at the satellite gave her a ’script for pain and when it ran out she came here.”

  “Thanks, Louise.” Caleb took the folder and used it to gesture at the treatment room.

  Adam followed him into the small room where a heavyset, middle-aged woman was half-sitting, halfreclining on a raised bed. The overhead fluorescent lights weren’t on. The only illumination in the room came from a fixture on the wall beside the bed.

  The woman appeared to be dozing, her left arm cradled against her chest. “Caroline? Are you awake?” Caleb inquired, washing his hands at a small sink by the door as he talked. “This guy here is Dr. Sauder. He’s visiting from Chicago. What seems to be the problem?”

  The woman sat up, her face furrowed with pain. She coughed, using her right hand to cover her mouth. “Sorry, Doctor. I’ve got this cold and cough that just won’t go away. It’s been weeks now.”

  “It’s that time of year,” Caleb said.

  “Well, my cold’s been bothering me longer than my arm. They took an X ray of my lungs at the clinic.”

  “The report’s here.” Caleb looked at her folder, then glanced at a computer monitor hooked to a retractable shelf on the wall. “Right’s clear. Left reads as showing bilateral apical pleural thickening,” he said to Adam. “I’ll take a look at the pictures when we finish here. Now, Caroline, how did you come to hurt your arm?” he asked, pushing the screen away as he walked over to rest his hand lightly on the woman’s shoulder. He moved his hands to both sides of her neck and moved her head from side to side. She remained quiet and composed until he tried to lift her left arm. Then she jerked away with a cry of distress.

  “Sorry. I don’t know how I hurt it, Doc. Nothing I can recall. It just started bothering me a while back, and it’s been getting worse and worse. When it got to where I couldn’t sleep at night for the pain, I went to the clinic. They gave me some pills. They make me pretty dopey, but they seemed to help at first. But now...”

  “Not giving you relief anymore?”

  “No, it’s real bad, Doc. I’m not a complainer. I’ve had four babies, you know. I can handle the pain. The doc at the clinic said maybe I have a pinched nerve from a bad disk in my neck. Said I should come here for more tests. Do you think that’s what my problem could be?” She looked directly at Adam for the first time.

  Something was wrong. The woman’s right pupil was dilated, a normal condition in the low light, but her left was contracted, unresponsive to the light. Clues started falling into place in Adam’s mind. He didn’t know if Caleb had noticed what he had, so he asked a question of his own. “Mrs. Stead, are you a smoker?”

  “I’ve cut way back,” she said defensively, but the telltale rasp in her voice put the lie to her words. “I hardly smoke half a pack a day.”

  “But you’ve been a smoker most of your life?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, and I know it ain’t good for me. This cough’s one of the reasons I cut back. So’s it would go away.

  “Doc, what can you do for me? I really can’t stand this pain no more. I need to get back to my job. And my youngest, he’s graduating from high school next month, and we’re planning a big party. But it’s mostly the pain. It’s really starting to bring me down.”

  “I’ll help you with the pain, Caroline,” Caleb said, patting her shoulder. “I’ll have the nurse get you something right now. But we have to run some more tests before we can decide on the best way to take care of this problem, okay?”

  She nodded, lying back against the upraised bed. “Okay, Doc. Whatever you say. I trust you.”

  “I’ll be back to check on you in a little while.”

  Adam followed him out of the exam room to the nurses’ station.

  “You saw it, didn’t you, Sauder? Her pupils are asymmetrical.”

  “Homer’s sign,” Adam said. “Yes, I saw it.” Something had paralyzed the nerves regulating the iris of her left eye, preventing it from functioning as it should. The blueprints of the human body weren’t always as logical as they could be. The nerves that control the iris of the eye originate not in the neck, but in the upper chest. Whatever was causing Mrs. Stead’s pain, it wasn’t a ruptured vertebral disc.

  Caleb gave orders for the pain medication to the ER nurse. He then picked up a big yellow envelope from the counter and took out an X ray, held it to the light and studied it for a long time. Adam waited for him to finish. “I wouldn’t have noticed her pupils if the overhead lights had been turned on,” he said after a while. “probably why they didn’t catch it this morning at the satellite. What’s your guess?”

  “It’s not a guess,” Adam said with quiet confidence. He didn’t have to look at the X ray to make his diagnosis. He knew. He felt himself shutting down, slipping into automatic clinical mode. “A middle-aged smoker with a chronic cough, a Homer’s sign and severe arm pain. I think you’ll find a carcinoma. Most likely a Pancoast tumor hiding under the pleural thickening. The arm pain and Homer’s sign suggest it’s already invaded the brachial plexus.”

  Caleb studied the X ray a few moments longer. “I think you’re right. The radiologist must have read this one while he was asleep. I’ll schedule the tests and talk to Baxter about taking over. He’s our oncologist.”

  “Are you going to tell her what you suspect?”

  “Yes,” Caleb said. “She’s expecting to get her neck operated on, or get some kind of therapy and be up and around in time for her kid’s graduation. It ain’t gonna work that way.” He slid the X ray back into the envelope and folded his arms. “Damn, I hate this part of the job. Thirty-five years in this business and I’ve never gotten used to it, and I never will even if I last another thirty-five years. I’ve just never figured out the right words to use to tell someone they’re going to die.” He slapped the envelope down on the counter. “There’s no reason for you to wait for me here, Sauder. Go on back to the clinic. Go on back to Leah.” Caleb walked away, his shoulders bowed by the weight of the bad news he was carrying.

  Once, a long time ago, Adam had felt the same way when he had to tell a patient that sooner, rather than later, she or he was going to die. But no more. He didn’t feel much of anything now, not empathy, not even love. But with the thought a vision of Leah flashed across his mind’s eye, and he knew that was no longer true. What he felt for her proved there was some spark of human feeling still alive deep within him. Right now, he loved Leah as much as he could, but he would never tell her. Because as much as he could wasn’t enough.

  IT WAS ALMOST TWO O’CLOCK. Adam had disappeared from the clinic nearly an hour earlier. He’d gone over to the hospital with Caleb, Dessie had told her, when Leah asked the receptionist if she’d seen him. Caleb had answered a page from the ER and taken Adam with him. It was anybody’s guess how long they’d be over there. But Dessie hoped Caleb would be back soon, because he had patients scheduled for the rest of the day and they were already running behind.

  Leah thanked the garrulous receptionist and went into the staff lounge. She poured herself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator and joined the others already seated around the break table. Clint Fackler was there reading the sports page between deliveries. He looked up, gave her a smile and went back to reading
.

  “Leah! Congratulations! I just heard the news,” Barb Baden, the clinic’s ultrasound technician said, reaching up to give Leah a quick hug as she circled the table. “I spent the morning over at the satellite and I just got back. I can’t believe it! You—pregnant! You’ve never said a word about a special man in your life. You could have knocked me over with a feather. But now that I see you in that outfit, I can see they were telling the truth.” She grinned with genuine pleasure at Leah’s news. “Clint says the baby’s father’s a neurosurgeon. I’m impressed. I hope I get to meet him.”

  Leah held on to her smile through the barrage of words. “You will. He’s with Caleb in ER. I’m sure they’ll be back soon.” She was tired, tense and weary of being a good sport about the staffs gentle teasing and endless questions. She felt as though she’d been on display all day, unable for a moment to let down her guard. She realized she’d surprised, and possibly shocked, some of her friends and co-workers with her announcement. It was only natural they were curious about her condition and her relationship with Adam.

  She had tried hard not to let it bother her when one of her patients announced flatly that she thought a woman should be married before she got pregnant, not after, or to feel uncomfortable when she came upon Dessie and one of the nurses with their heads together whispering, and neither one would meet her eyes, or when she walked into a room and conversation stopped for a moment before picking up again.

  She thought more than once of washing her hands of all of it, leaving and walking the few blocks to her house, getting in her Jeep—Caleb’s orders that she not drive for a few more days be damned—and heading off into the hills to check on Aurelia. But her pride wouldn’t let her. Besides, she’d had one or two fleeting spells of light-headedness she hadn’t told anyone about. They were probably nothing more than a reaction to the anxiety of telling everyone about her pregnancy while trying to work things out with Adam, but she couldn’t be certain. She certainly couldn’t take a chance on having another spell while she was behind the wheel.