The Heroic Surgeon

by Olivia Gates

  He closed his eyes, nestled back into her firm, warm bosom. “Consider me one of those…”

  She pinched his arm, manually forced both lids open, peeling them off his unfocused eyes. “You’re not and you will not be again! You will drink and then I will take out the chest tubes, sew you up then take you for examination.”

  “And then you’ll take me home?” Home. That was her place to him now. Where was that around here? Now, that was something to keep awake for, to be in it, with her—but he’d just rest for a while first…

  No such luck. She nudged him again. “C’mon. Open those eyes. Up, up!”

  The woman was pitiless. “Gulnar! I’ve been shot, for heaven’s sake!”

  “So? Nothing was really damaged. I examined you thoroughly while I was trying to find out where all the blood covering your right side was coming from.”

  It was only then that he noticed. His blood-soaked shirt was closed over two large pads, one on the entry wound in his back and one over the exit wound in his chest, with slits through it for the chest tubes. Immaculate as usual. She must have taken his shirt off, examined him, performed the tube thoracotomies and put the shirt back on to preserve body heat. With his blood loss and shock he was still a prime candidate for hypothermia even in this heat. She’d done everything to the letter of the most advanced life-support protocols.

  And to think she’d done it all, so thorough and efficient, minutes after surviving such horrors! What she must have felt, dealing with it all while coming to terms with having to kill another human being to save him, then still having him shot and possibly dying on her hands…

  He needed to purge all her terror and helplessness, her stress and rage. But how, when he was the focus of her dissatisfaction? “You’re angry with me, bella mia, aren’t you?”

  “Wow. What insight! Angry is too mild a word, Dr. Dante!”

  “Oh, no! You’ve already called me Dante. You can’t go back to calling me ‘Doctor’ now!”

  “You don’t want to know what I want to call you right now!”

  “You mean beside idiot, insane and stupid?”

  “Oh, that was the censored version of what I think of you for exposing yourself to needless danger, for—for…” Her voice choked, her tears flowed again. “I kept screaming for you to get down, to just get the hell down! It was as if you wanted to get yourself killed!”

  Which could be an interpretation not too far from the truth. “Says the woman who refused a sure chance of survival!”

  She wiped an angry hand across her eyes, adding another shade of smudging to her face. “I accepted death. I didn’t invite it! Do you know just how lucky you’ve been?”

  “Yeah. It’s so weird. I thought I’d used up nine lifetimes’ worth of luck in my life so far. Amazing to find out I still had some left over. I bet my luck has run dry now.”

  “It will if you don’t shut up and drink!” She turned, grabbed a bottle up off the ground, put it to his lips.

  He took an experimental sip. “Ugh. What’s that?”

  “A local drink.”

  “Tastes like the local refuse.”

  “Drink!”

  “Tyrant.” Her smile felt like a spotlight had been turned on, illuminating his heart. He gulped another mouthful. It tasted even worse. “Just thank God you don’t have to drink this swill…”

  She stroked his cheek, her smile widening. “I did drink it. Two bottlefuls.”

  “When you didn’t need to? When no one was threatening to keep you awake until you did? Brave woman!”

  The look she gave him! His heart swelled with pride and pleasure that she appreciated his lame jokes. “It’s a potent folk remedy called Suakiri, made of an assortment of fermented seeds and molasses. High-calorie drink, packed with vitamins and minerals, all the things you need right now. The Azernians swear by it.”

  He mumbled something under his breath.

  “What?”

  He sighed. “Don’t mind me. I’m just swearing at it.”

  Her bone-melting smile blossomed into a giggle. She resumed stroking his cheek and watched him as he gulped the first few swallows. It felt as if he’d forgotten how to drink. He had no co-ordination. Whether due to her touch, or with depletion, he had no idea.

  It wasn’t until the liquid started running down his chin that her face pinched on a surge of renewed worry. She adjusted his head and the bottle. “Easy. We don’t want you to choke. Not a good idea to cough now.”

  “As if I even could. If any liquid goes down the wrong way, you’ll have to aspirate my trachea.”

  “Dante, shut up and sip.”

  He did. Surrendered to her ministrations, sipped and moaned his enjoyment at her stroking. He even thought he purred. It was amazing. There he was, in the after-math of a traumatic situation, feeling so good, so contented. It had to be shock.

  And that Suakiri must really have magical powers. Life was seeping back into him with every sip. Must get the recipe. But he still wanted to sleep. Not the fading away of depletion, but the repose of recharging. He took the last gulp, hummed his satisfaction, adjusted his position and closed his eyes.

  “Time to recheck you!” Gulnar substituted her lap for a folded towel below his head and undertook his reassessment with dogged determination.

  “Gulnar, I’m fine. You’ve saved me. Again.”

  “Let me be the judge of that!” She opened his shirt, slipped his arm out of one sleeve and recorded his pressure.

  “One-ten over seventy, right?” Her astonished glance rested on him for half a second then she removed his pads. “I can tell. And I can tell you, whatever danger I was in, I’m past it. If you have other patients to see to, you can go now. I’ll just rest until you come back.”

  “There are dozens of medical personnel on the scene now, more than enough to handle all the injured. And until it is your turn to ride in one of the ambulances going to and from Srajna General Hospital, you’re not sleeping, and that’s final.” He opened his mouth. Her hand below his chin closed it for him. “Can you sit up?”

  He scowled at her and did, feeling the assortment of spears embedded in him shifting, introducing him to new levels of pain. “It’s a bunch of rubbish, you know, this myth about a trauma victim deteriorating if you let them sleep.”

  “I know. I’m just being unscientifically paranoid. Humor me.”

  He watched her eyes misting in the dimness as she rechecked both the entry and exit wounds, made sure that the blood level in the underwater-seal bottle was no longer rising now he was sitting up and in a position for better drainage. She seemed to be debating whether to leave them in or take them out. She shared her diagnosis with him, sought his. “I think there will be no more bleeding, that I can remove the chest tubes. What do you think?”

  He looked down his chest, and only saw her splayed hand over his tensing muscles just below the wound. Images of catching that hand in his teeth and sucking each of her fingers completely into his mouth mushroomed. He winced, prayed that darkness was obscuring his blatant, idiotic reaction.

  “What’s wrong? Oh, lie down again!”

  He didn’t know whether to be thankful or exasperated that she had misinterpreted his state. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.” Which was an outright lie. Focus, Guerriero! “And I think your diagnosis is correct. This looks self-limiting. I think you can remove the upper chest tube. And I bet most of the bleeding wasn’t from the lung injury, but from a couple of torn intercostal and mammary arteries. Bet they went into spasm, made a healthy clot. As long as my pressure holds, I don’t think there’s any problem. But to be on the safe side and save you from introducing another chest tube if I start bleeding again, just fold the lower one in place and apply a bandage over it. If in a few hours there’s no more bleeding, you can remove it.”

  Her nod accompanied a sigh of relief and a tremulous smile. She extracted the chest tube so gently he didn’t feel it being pulled from deep within his chest.

  He drew a deeper b
reath, felt a rush of air and life and gratitude. He’d walked into the rebels’ stronghold yesterday, then into that municipal building today, with the willingness to end it all hovering at the periphery of his mind. But now he was fiercely glad that that woman hadn’t succeeded in killing him. Gulnar inhabited this world and he wasn’t in any hurry to leave it now.

  Humor her? He’d do anything at all for her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “WILL you do something for me?”

  Gulnar met Dante’s eyes in the mirror, watched his left hand rubbing his three-day beard. He should look like hell. He did—yet was still heart-stopping.

  His eyes flickered in uneasy entreaty, his voice dipped to danger level. “Please?”

  Her bones increased their melting rate. Soon he’d have to scoop her off the floor.

  Did he really think he needed to be uncomfortable asking her anything? Didn’t he know she needed no amount of persuasion, would have no hesitation to do anything for him, to let him have anything at all? Just as everyone else would be falling over themselves to give him the moon, and any other planet that he might fancy?

  He should know. But he didn’t, even after being shown, in every way. It said a lot about him that he still didn’t accept everyone’s esteem and appreciation, didn’t acknowledge that he deserved them. He acted as if he’d done nothing at all. She’d never seen anyone more uncomfortable with attention and gratitude.

  Ever since officials and reporters had milked the distraught survivors for every last bit of detail about the crisis, Dante had been fighting off both.

  It hadn’t been easy, calming the over-zealous reports, with her in the middle translating both ways, trying her best to prevent the crisis from metamorphosing into a myth.

  But there had been no stemming the tide of the excited masses that had swooped down on them, proclaiming him a national hero. He had been all but wrapped in cotton wool and swept to Srajna General Hospital, with every high official and security chief trailing ahead and behind their ambulance in a stately motorcade. They had even followed them through ER then every diagnostic suite as a dozen emergency doctors, radiologists and trauma surgeons had hovered over Dante, performing all kinds of unnecessary tests and taking every far-fetched precaution.

  She had continued translating Dante’s insistence that she’d already done all that needed to be done, that all that remained was a simple chest X-ray to see if there wasn’t a residual clot around his lung, that all other costly tests were unnecessary. His insistence that as a trauma surgeon himself he should be allowed an opinion of his own condition had been overridden. Then his objections had grown stronger, and her translations more selective.

  When all else had failed, he had demanded, loudly, to be left alone.

  That needed no translation.

  And that was when her role was considered over and she was herded out with the departing people. Frantic to be torn away from Dante’s side, she almost burst into tears of gratitude and relief when he clung to her. But to her distress he didn’t stop there. He forced her to translate to the crowd his indignation at their dismissal of her role in it all. “Just tell them what I’m saying,” he persisted. “Word for word, Gulnar. I’ll know if you’re watering it down.”

  She needn’t have worried about his extravagant report, though. No one was inclined to believe that she was the real hero, the one who had snatched him from death’s jaws twice, and the reason all those who’d survived had. It was more palatable for them to believe a man of Dante’s stature and abilities to be the real and sole hero of the day.

  Though she was happy to fade into the background, to get no recognition or gratitude, their prejudice still rankled. Chauvinist pigs!

  But, to be fair, women thought the same. Even more. Chauvinist race, it seemed.

  To further clarify her status in his eyes, he ordered a bed to be brought in for her in his room, made it clear she was the one to consult with about his condition, that she would be his companion until he was out of the hospital. Then he growled them all out of their room.

  After freshening up all he could, he sat there in bed, envying her her no-holds-barred shower, huge and haggard and just too much for her battered senses. Then he asked her permission to sleep.

  Torn between wanting to howl with laughter at his small-boy-asking-mama’s-consent act and her phobia of seeing his eyes closing, she forced herself under control. The man had to sleep some time. To save her sanity, she planned to stay awake beside him, counting his breaths. That sanity evaporated when he raised exhausted eyes to her and asked for a kiss goodnight.

  It was as if a dam had burst. Tenderness swelled and crashed inside her. She wanted to throw herself at him, but couldn’t, dammit. He could barely breathe without moaning in agony, analgesics and all. But when she took his lips, he sank into instant slumber, his groan becoming one of contentment, reverberating on her lips, in her soul. She cast a look at her bed then curled herself in the few inches of space beside him.

  She began her vigil, lost count of the times she counted his heartbeats, soothed his starts and sent up prayers of thankfulness for his survival, for his very existence, and a plea for his recovery.

  It was so weird. She was beyond finished. Beyond devastated. The ghastly memory of taking another’s life, no matter how justified, and the nightmares of every complication he could suffer were tearing at her. Yet she wasn’t wishing all those horrors erased, like she did those before them. They had introduced her to him, and he was part of them and she would cling to their memory, scars and nightmares and all.

  She eventually succumbed to her own fatigue, but only when his vital signs remained steady and strong. She woke up to his body fused to hers, to his gaze tender and restored. It was such a privilege, such luxury to lie there, staring at him, exchanging expressions of gratitude for sharing the ordeal, halving the burden of recollections.

  Then he advised her to get out of bed. He was hungry enough to eat her. She would have offered herself as fast food if she hadn’t needed to take care of him first.

  The morning nurses came in and tried to do that. He wouldn’t let them. He wanted no one else near him. Gratitude, relief and pride choked her as she fed him breakfast and tended to his medical needs.

  Not that anyone but him trusted her measures. With the morning rounds, the hordes of doctors were back, checking and double-checking them. Dante conceded that the fastest way to get rid of them was to go with the flow. This time he let them satisfy themselves, ooh and aah over his luck and improvement. Once the test results were back to confirm his stable condition, the happy news was announced to the panting press and representatives of the Azernian town whose people had been involved in the hostage situation. Then they were let in to visit him.

  They got Gulnar’s rushed thanks out of the way before turning the full force of their gratitude on Dante. She tried to convey Dante’s discomfort at the extravagance of their emotions, but it only raised him higher in their eyes. They kept asking what they could do for him in return. It was clear that at the height of their emotions these people would have laid all their belongings, all their daughters at his feet.

  No, scratch that. The daughters, and every other woman of every age and marital status, would hurl themselves there. No question.

  He was turning away from the mirror now, bringing back that first moment when she’d seen him walking into that hall. After all he’d been through, poetry still coursed in his every move. Looking imposing and majestic in the ridiculous just-below-the-knee hospital gown had to be some world precedent, too!

  She waited for her breath to return, her heart to resume beating. No such luck.

  What was the matter with her? She’d already shared with him the most traumatic experiences two people could share, had had her hands all over him in every possible way—well, not every one, but she had kissed and fondled him. She’d slept with him—OK, beside him. But to be shy now? When she’d never known what shyness was? For heaven’s sake!


  Her mind was incredulous but her body was going to pieces, her heart staggering in her chest with his every step closer.

  Look away. Make a joke. Do something.

  She escaped his intense gaze, only to find hers rushing down his body, greedy, feeding her rioting thoughts, inflaming her simmering senses.

  She had noted the chiseled perfection of his torso and back while treating him. But it had been out of the question to salivate over them then. Now, with her body rested and replenished, with him out of danger, it was a different story. It was beyond her to resist making a visual feast of the rest of him, especially the parts she could see clearly, his legs, oh, my—those legs! She saw them between hers…

  He stopped just a foot away. Oh, hell, he had to see her condition, read her thoughts. His gaze was burning. Then he dropped it.

  He looked away, exhaled. “You won’t have to do anything else for me again, promise.” He paused, a grimace of disgust twisting his expressive features.

  He really didn’t like imposing on others in any way, didn’t he? He really thought it was less than a total pleasure, tending to his every need. Time to disabuse him. “Let’s get one thing straight here, Dante. You can ask anything of me.”

  Obsidian eyes turned on her now, explicit, stormy. “Anything, Gulnar?”

  Oh, yes. Yes! Anything at all.

  Reason tried to intrude, to point out their situation, his shooting just fourteen hours ago. Reason didn’t have a prayer. What was it anyway? Just stupidities and shackles designed to waste life and chances and foster regrets and bitterness. If he wanted her, if he would have her, she’d offer herself. She did, made the offer open-ended, total, unconditional. “Anything, Dante.”

  He bent slowly, holding her eyes until he took her lips in a fierce press. In only seconds he stepped back, still uncertain. She pulled him back, her wary self-consciousness gone, the unconditional tenderness she reserved for impersonal duty, the unguarded faith opening her arms around him and her mouth to his tongue.