by Laura Iding
“Are you sure?” Steven asked, his gaze skeptical. “Wheel me over to the computer screen so I can review the results for myself.”
Jake let out a disgusted sigh. “Listen, Cole Johnson is the neurosurgeon here tonight, and I’ve heard he’s finished with the patient in the ICU so he’s on his way down. You can ask him, if you don’t believe me.”
Steven insisted on speaking to Cole, so Hannah quickly brought him over to Steven’s bedside.
“We’re going to wait a few days for the swelling to go down before we take you to surgery,” the neurosurgeon said, after verifying what Jake had already seen on the MRI scan. “But there’s no reason to think you won’t make a complete recovery.”
“Thank God,” Steven whispered.
With a triumphant smile Jake handed over his phone. “Call your wife.”
Steven grimaced but took the cell phone and made the call.
Relieved at the news, Hannah went back to work. Within the next hour they’d triaged all the MVA patients, and things quickly settled back to normal. As there were extra staff members who’d stayed during the disaster, she wasn’t plagued by zillions of phone calls. Hannah gladly headed down to her call room at about one-thirty in the morning.
Using her key, she opened the door and suddenly felt Jake behind her. She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart. “Hey, you scared me,” she chided.
“Sorry,” he murmured. His gaze intently searched hers. “Hannah, I know we agreed to keep things professional, but I can’t seem to stay away. Would you reconsider and have dinner with me tomorrow night?”
“You mean, as friends?”
Slowly he shook his head. “No, Hannah. I want more than friendship from you.”
The husky confession did nothing to calm her erratic pulse. And she couldn’t say no. Because she couldn’t stay away from him, either. “Yes, Jake. I’d love to have dinner with you. Tomorrow or any other night.”
The smile that lit up his face made her heart stumble and trip in her chest.
She cared about him. A lot. Far more than she should. Logically she knew Jake had the power to hurt her, but she shoved the doubt aside. They might be from different worlds, or even different planets, but he wasn’t like the rest of the attending physicians.
He cared about people. People like her.
And suddenly she didn’t want him to go.
“Would you be interested in staying for a while?” she asked, pushing the door to the call room open in a silent invitation, nervously holding her breath.
But she needn’t have worried. His green eyes flared with heat. “Are you sure, Hannah? I can wait if you’re not ready.”
“That’s very kind, Jake. But I’m sure. Absolutely, positively sure.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
JAKE followed Hannah into the call room, his heart hammering so hard in his chest he was surprised she couldn’t hear it beating against his ribs.
For the first time since their initial meeting at Shipwrecked, it seemed they were both in sync, wanting exactly the same thing.
Hannah paused in the center of the room and glanced over her shoulder at him, a hint of uncertainty in her gaze.
He closed the door behind him and twisted the lock. He held her gaze, allowing the need he felt to show on his face.
Hannah’s answering smile only made his heart pound more. There wasn’t a speck of makeup left on her face, and they’d worked for hours on the disaster victims, but she still had the power to make his knees go weak.
“Hannah, you’re so beautiful, you take my breath away,” he murmured, approaching slowly, as if there may be a chance she’d change her mind.
She didn’t. She met him halfway. And suddenly he understood that rushing into that one-night stand hadn’t been to their advantage. In fact, that night together, while physically intense, had only complicated things.
They’d needed time to get to know each other, personally and professionally. Two weeks didn’t seem like an incredibly long time, yet they’d worked side by side through numerous difficult situations, including this most recent disaster.
Under intense pressure, it was almost impossible to hide the true nature of a person’s personality. Maybe if he’d worked with Allie this closely, he would have been clued in to the games she was playing sooner.
But this wasn’t about Allie. It was about Hannah. And making sure she understood how much he wanted her. How much he cared about her.
The L word almost formed in his mind before he ruthlessly pushed it aside. He cared about Hannah, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to love anyone. At least, not yet.
“I wanted you, Jake, the moment I saw you,” she said honestly. “And leaving you the next morning was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a long time.”
Any lingering doubts about what they were about to do flew right out of his mind. He crossed the room, cupped her face in his hands and lowered his mouth to hers.
She let out a husky moan, kissing him back and pressing urgently against him, but he refused to be rushed. “Relax,” he said between kisses. “We have plenty of time. Richard promised to keep an eye on the ICU patients for a while.”
She froze and pulled away, her eyes wide with horror. “You actually told him I wasn’t to be disturbed?” she asked on a choked gasp.
“No!” He didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship, especially the people they worked with. “I had a little heart-to-heart with Richard at the end of last week because I felt like he was slacking off. I think he’s trying to make amends.”
“Oh.” The acute relief on her face was comical. Then she sighed. “I should stop trying to make this more complicated.”
“Good idea,” he said in agreement, kissing her again. Slowly. Gently. Drawing out the pleasure as much as possible.
As always, the sexual chemistry between them flared to life the moment they touched. But he held the surge of awareness in check, taking his time and exploring the depths of her mouth.
“Jake,” she moaned, when he finally released her lips to explore the curve of her neck. She tugged at his scrubs, sliding his shirt up to rake her nails over his chest. He shuddered and swallowed a groan. “Please?”
Slowly, he reminded himself. He wanted to take things slowly. “Hmm, not yet.”
“What?” she gasped, when he licked the enticing V between her breasts.
He chuckled and scooped her slim frame into his arms, placing her on the narrow bed. It wouldn’t be as comfortable as his king-size bed, but it would have to do. He stripped off his shirt and helped her with hers, before stretching out beside her.
“There’s no need to hurry,” he advised, dodging when she reached down for the drawstring of his scrub pants. This would be over far too soon if he let her explore him. “I want to see and kiss every inch of you first.”
She gasped and moaned when he bared her breasts. He couldn’t help smiling a bit as he took a rosy tip into his mouth, suckling gently.
She cried out with pleasure and he hung on to his control with an effort. While the few hours they had seemed like an amazing gift, he knew that a few hours with Hannah would never be enough.
Never. He’d always want more.
* * *
He was killing her, Hannah thought as his mouth dropped to the region of her belly button.
Slowly and irrevocably killing her.
“Jake, please,” she begged shamelessly. She didn’t understand why he was holding back. “Stop torturing me.”
His breath blew over her damp skin as he chuckled. “Torture? And here I thought I was pleasuring you.”
“I’m going to die if you pleasure me much more,” she said in a completely serious tone. “And it’s not fair, because I want to pleasure you, too.”
He glanced up at her, his gaze glittering with barely leashed passion. The intensity of his gaze made her suck in a harsh breath. This was so different from the first night they’d spent together.
Jake was different. More se
rious. More intent.
Some tiny part of her brain warned her there was more going on here than she realized, but that thought was quickly overruled by her hormones clamoring for more. She didn’t want slowly, she wanted him. “Jake, I want you now. Please?”
Her plea must have gotten through because he stripped off her remaining scrubs and found a condom from heaven knew where, before pulling her close. She gasped on a wave of pleasure when he slid deep.
Finally!
But even though she was ready for the wild burst of passion she’d experienced before, he continued to move at a snail’s pace, with slow, deep, deliberate strokes that only increased the pleasure as he gazed into her eyes.
Her heart swelled with an emotion she didn’t dare name as the tension grew more intense between them. She felt emotionally naked. Transparently exposed. She’d never experienced this level of intimacy with anyone before.
Only with Jake. Twice now with Jake.
When the overwhelming flood of desire couldn’t be contained a second longer, he cried out her name in a guttural voice as the peak of pleasure toppled them both.
Her heart hammering in her chest, she closed her eyes and held him close, realizing she’d gotten far more than she’d bargained for when she’d invited Jake into her call room.
What they’d just experienced was far from one-night-stand sex. It was more, much, much more.
The real question now was: Where were they going to go from here?
Too bad she didn’t have the courage to ask.
By the time her heart rate returned to normal, she gave in to the fatigue that pulled her under.
Her pager woke her about an hour later. She almost fell off the narrow bed before remembering she wasn’t alone.
She fumbled through their discarded clothing, searching for the annoying device. And when she finally picked the pager up, her heart sank when she realized it was Jake’s, not hers. And then her pager went off too, indicating the call was a trauma alert.
“Jake,” she said urgently, when he didn’t so much as stir at the noise of their two pagers. Using the light from the phone, she quickly sought and found her undergarments, reminded of the night she’d tried to sneak away from him. She pulled on a scrub top, but then had to tear it off again, when she realized it was his.
After she finally managed to get dressed in the proper clothing she reached out to shake his shoulder. “Wake up. There’s a motor-cycle-crash victim on the way.”
“Grumph,” he mumbled, turning over on the narrow bed. Good grief, was he always this difficult to rouse in the mornings? How on earth had he made it through his residency program?
“Seriously, Jake, you need to get up.” She wasn’t facing a motorcycle crash on her own. She shut her phone and turned on the bedside lamp, which only had a forty-watt bulb but still made her wince.
“I’m up,” he muttered, finally swinging upright and blinking the sleep from his eyes. She tossed his clothing in his lap and he squinted at her. “Did you say MCC?”
“Yes. You have to hurry.”
She couldn’t help being impressed. When Jake woke up, he woke up quickly. In less than thirty seconds he was dressed and back in attending mode. “Let’s go.”
Had he lost his marbles? “You go first,” she said, giving him a slight shove toward the door. “We can’t walk into the ED together.”
For a second he hesitated, but then gave an abrupt nod as he opened the door and left. She waited a full two minutes, giving him plenty of time, before heading out after him.
They were crazy to think they’d be able to keep their relationship a secret for long. Especially if they continued sharing time together in her call room.
Since that was a problem she simply couldn’t deal with right now, she shoved it aside and took a deep breath before entering the trauma bay.
They must have taken longer than she’d realized because the patient had arrived and Jake was already barking out orders. She noticed he tended to do that when he was tense.
She came up to stand next to him. “How bad is it?”
“Too early to say for sure, but he’s holding his own at the moment.”
Keeping her eye on the monitor, she watched as the staff quickly obtained blood, put in IV access and performed an overall assessment.
“Dr. Stewart, I need you to place an arterial line in this patient,” he said.
She was taken aback by the formal use of her name—was that for Richard’s benefit? But she quickly turned her attention to the patient. She didn’t want to brag, but she’d become known as being an expert in arterial line placements during her ICU rotation as a fourth-year medical student. She’d never missed.
The nurse closest to the supply cart pulled out the sterile tray and she prepped the site. After donning sterile gloves, she felt for the radial pulse.
Except it wasn’t there.
“I’m not feeling a pulse here,” she said sharply. Glancing up at the monitor over the patient’s head, the heart rhythm looked normal enough. “He’s in PEA.”
“Let’s do a pericardial tap to rule out cardiac tamponade,” Jake said calmly.
Feeling far from calm, she glanced up at him, silently asking if he intended for her to do the procedure. He nodded. Since she still wore sterile gloves, she waited for the nurse to open a new, longer needle for her. Her stomach tightened. This was a procedure she’d watched several times but had never performed on her own. After twisting the syringe to the end of the needle, she used her left hand to find the dichotic notch and then gently inserted the needle. Tugging on the syringe plunger, she withdrew a full sixty milliliters of blood.
“His pulse is back,” one of the nurses announced. Hannah couldn’t help breathing a sigh of relief. She’d done it!
“Don’t withdraw the needle,” Jake advised, reminding her that the danger wasn’t over. “We’ll need to make sure we prevent this from happening again.” He glanced at the nurse, Alice. “Call for a CT surgery consult—he must have damaged his heart and possibly his lungs during the crash.”
Holding the needle as steady as possible, she twisted another syringe on the end and pulled back. This time she only withdrew ten milliliters. But she still didn’t remove the needle, prepared to withdraw more blood if the patient continued to bleed into the sac around his heart.
She glanced over at Jake, unable to hide her curiosity. “How did you know it was a pericardial effusion and not something else, like a pneumothorax? There are many reasons for this guy to be in PEA, but you automatically picked the right one.”
He lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “It’s the diagnosis that made the most sense. I could picture his chest hitting the handlebars of the motorcycle as he crashed. A tension pneumo was second on my list, but my gut was telling me that it was his heart. Doesn’t matter that much because we would have ruled out all potential causes eventually.”
Yeah, she thought, impressed, but ruling out all options would have taken precious time. Would that type of instinctive medical decision making ever come so easily for her? She certainly hoped it would.
Their patient had a broken left leg, but his neurological status was remarkably intact. She kept drawing back on the needle in his heart as she listened to Jake and the neurosurgeon on call talk about the risks for going straight to surgery. The patient’s closed leg fracture would need to be addressed, but wasn’t the patient’s top concern at the moment.
“How much have you taken off in total?” Daniel Fischer, the cardiothoracic surgeon on call, asked.
“Seventy-five ccs,” she responded.
He nodded. “Okay, I’ll take him to surgery. But you’re coming with me, until I’m ready to open his chest.”
Hannah wasn’t going to argue. In fact, she was thrilled to be able to follow the patient up to the O.R. with Dr. Fischer. It was a good hour and a half later before she went back down to find Jake.
“So how was it?” he asked with a tired smile.
“Awesome,” she
answered. “And the tear in the blood vessel was small enough that Dr. Fischer could fix it pretty quickly. Did I miss anything?”
“No, I checked on Steven and he’s doing fine. We need to get ready for rounds.”
She was shocked to realize that time had flown by so quickly. It was already six in the morning. It seemed like just a few minutes ago that she and Jake had been in the middle of the fog disaster.
The morning rounds went fine, and after they’d finished, she went back down to her call room to shower and change. When she came out of the bathroom dressed in jeans and a blouse, she was surprised to find Jake waiting there for her.
“Ready to go?” he asked casually.
Go where? “Ah, sure.” She hid her confusion by gathering up her personal items and shoving them into her backpack.
“Your place or mine?” he asked, as she opened the door of her call room.
She paused and glanced back at him. “I was planning to go home,” she said inanely. Alone, she silently added, but didn’t voice her thought.
He must have sensed her hesitation, because he smiled. “Hannah, I’m tired and I’m sure you are, too. I don’t have anything on my agenda other than a few hours of sleep. But we have plans to spend the evening together, remember?”
How could she forget? His dinner invitation had been a very nice surprise.
But she hadn’t anticipated they’d spend the entire day together. What seemed so simple when they were alone became more complicated when they were out in public.
She told herself to relax and be glad he wasn’t brushing her off after the intense lovemaking they’d shared. But she wasn’t quite ready to return to his place. “Mine.”
“Okay.” He didn’t argue. By tacit agreement, they walked out to the parking structure where he’d left his car.
“You should really take the subway,” she chided, as he pulled out onto the road.
“To save the earth?” he asked with a dry laugh. “I didn’t realize you were a tree hugger, Hannah.”
