The M.D. Meets His Match

by Marie Ferrarella

  Shayne was already crossing to the car in his slippers, unmindful of the newly fallen snow. “Let’s bring her inside.”

  A preliminary examination of the older woman with April hovering anxiously in the room proved inconclusive. It looked to Shayne as if April was right about the minor heart attack, but he didn’t want to speculate without more data.

  Leaving Ursula with Sydney to help her get dressed, he took April aside. “I’m going to have to take your grandmother to the clinic, April, before I can tell you with any certainty just what’s going on.” He glanced over his shoulder toward his patient. “But I think you’re right, I think she did have a minor episode.” A gentle smile moved his lips. “That’s a euphemism for a heart attack that doesn’t leave you flat on your back.”

  Turning around, he crossed back to Ursula. “Looks like I finally get to do that echocardiogram you’ve been putting off, Ursula.” Shayne looked at his wife. “Syd, wake Mac up,” he told her, referring to their oldest son. “Tell him he gets to be in charge until we get back—and not to let power go to his head.” He saw her look at him quizzically. “I’m going to need your help with Ursula.”

  “I’m coming with you,” April cut in, eager to be of any use. “Sydney doesn’t have to—”

  She got no further. “I need you to go get Alison,” Shayne told her. “And more importantly, her brother.”

  The first thing April thought of was that Jimmy was a surgeon. She could feel her heart beginning to pound as anxiety returned. She turned so that her grandmother couldn’t see her lips. “Are you going to have to operate?” she asked, lowering her voice.

  Shayne shook his head. “I don’t know yet. I really hope not.” He needed to get dressed. “Tell them to meet us at the clinic.”

  April paused only long enough to take her grandmother’s hands in her own and squeeze them. Gran gave her a brave smile as she wrapped her long, thin fingers around hers. A sliver of panic shot through April. Her grandmother’s grip had never felt this weak before.

  She bent her head, her lips by her grandmother’s ear. “Hang on, Gran, we’re going to get you through this. I swear we will,” she said fiercely. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  April hurried out, praying she hadn’t just lied to her grandmother.

  She wasn’t sure just how she made it. One moment she was in front of Shayne’s house, the next, she was bringing the car to a screeching halt in front of the single-story rambling house Luc had had built for Alison after they were married.

  April was so filled with tears, she was afraid she was going to explode.

  That’s not going to help Gran, she warned herself, getting out. She nearly slipped on the ground. The storm had swelled again, bringing with it more snow. The wind whipped across her face as she banged on the front door, forgoing niceties.

  It was Jimmy, his guest room located just off the living room, who got to the door first. Wearing blue jeans he’d hastily dragged on and nothing else, he was combing the hair out of his eyes with one hand as he opened the front door with the other.

  The moment he saw her, he knew it had to do with her grandmother. April’s eyes were almost wild with fear and bright with tears she was holding prisoner. Instinct had him grabbing her arms, afraid she would fall at the slightest provocation.

  “April, is it your grandmother?”

  He knew, she thought, swallowing, a lump in her throat temporarily rendering her unable to speak. She nodded her head vigorously.

  Jimmy moved her aside, looking toward her car. “She’s here?”

  April caught his arm before he could walk out. “No, Shayne’s taking her to the clinic. He—I think she’s had a heart attack. He wanted me to come get you and Alison.” She heard noise in the background and voices, but couldn’t focus on them. The panic was threatening to overwhelm her. Still holding his arm, she wasn’t aware of squeezing hard. “Jimmy, she can’t—”

  “She won’t,” he told her firmly, cutting in. There was no point in looking at odds or reality, or saying that that they were in some out-of-the-way place devoid of the latest technology rather than in the middle of a large hospital where her chances, if Ursula was actually having a heart attack, would be far better. April didn’t need to hear that. She needed something to hold on to, if only for a little while. Anything else would have been self-serving and cruel. He kissed her forehead gently. “Just wait a second, I’ll get Alison—”

  The kindness nearly undid her. She fared far better in turmoil, with people shouting around her. April swallowed a sob.

  “Already here.” Alison came up behind him. She’d heard enough to let her know what was going on. “I heard,” she assured Jimmy, her hand on his shoulder. She offered April an encouraging smile. “All I need is a minute to get my clothes.” She was hurrying away before she finished her statement.

  April looked as if she was going to shatter any second, he thought, looking at her. The reserved woman who had all but frozen him out these past three days with little to no explanation had vanished. The woman he’d fallen for in the cabin stood in her place.

  His heart went out to April but he knew that pity was the last thing she’d welcome.

  So he gave her an order, instinctively knowing that would work far better. Pointing to her car, he instructed, “Go start the engine.”

  She did what he told without a word.

  April looked at her watch.

  It had been two hours since she’d watched the doors to the small operating room in the rear close. What were they doing in there? Too much time had elapsed.

  It shouldn’t be taking this long, should it?

  Alone in the outer office since Sydney had returned to her children, April didn’t know what to do with herself. With the phone lines still down, Sydney had offered to go get both Max and June, but April had convinced her not to. There was no point in all three of them going through this agony. It was bad enough she had to endure it.

  Gran, she’d told Sydney as the other woman left, was going to be fine.

  Sydney had nodded. “She couldn’t be in better hands.”

  Shayne had used the brand-new echocardiogram machine that had been a philanthropic gift from Luc’s friend, a former resident of Hades, to discern that Gran had a dangerous blockage of one of the main arteries leading to her heart. Normally with a blockage of that nature, they’d lose no time in performing a by-pass. But Shayne didn’t have the necessary equipment to successfully perform the surgery.

  April had paled at the news. “So what are you going to do?”

  It was Jimmy who had suggested doing an angioplasty as a stop-gap procedure. “That way, her heart can sustain the necessary blood flow until there’s a break in the weather and she can be flown to Anchorage.” He’d looked toward her as next of kin.

  “Do it,” she’d said without hesitation.

  They were in there now, Jimmy, Shayne and Alison, with her grandmother’s life literally in their hands while she sat out here, climbing out of her skin, counting minutes on a clock with hands that seemingly refused to move.

  She was pretty useless, April thought angrily, upbraiding herself as she paced the length of the waiting room. She’d been in Hades for more than two weeks and in that time she’d been unable to convince her grandmother to go to Providence Hospital for a more thorough exam.

  Damn it. April wiped a tear away from cheek. She hadn’t even been able to force her grandmother to have the echocardiogram done after Shayne had gotten the machine in. If she had bullied her into taking the test, then this wouldn’t be happening. They would have gotten Gran to the hospital in time to do the surgery properly.

  Why hadn’t she been able to convince Gran?

  Because she’d been too busy showing Jimmy around, April thought, disgusted with herself. If she hadn’t been so self-absorbed, so wrapped up in having a good time, then—

  The door to the rear room opened. Like a shot, April was there, eagerly pouncing on Shayne. Afraid of wha
t he might tell her. Praying it was good news.

  “Well? Is she—?”

  Pulling down his surgical mask, Shayne smiled at her. “She’s out of danger for the moment. There are times when an angioplasty is enough, but in your grandmother’s case, she’ll still need to go to Anchorage to have that by-pass done.”

  That was understood. Tentative relief began poking around within her. “How soon will she have to go?”

  “No immediate rush now, thanks to Jimmy.”

  Weary, Shayne glanced over his shoulder to the back room. There was no doubt in his mind that it’d been a blessing, having Jimmy here. The last time he’d seen an angioplasty done, he’d been part of a medical firm on Park Avenue. Working alongside the younger man had taken Shayne back to when he and his brother had run the clinic here together.

  “Once Ursula recovers from her anesthesia, we can make further arrangements.” His smile broadened, guessing at what April must have gone through. “Don’t worry, your grandmother has a great constitution. And it didn’t hurt having a great surgeon in there, either. We were lucky to have Jimmy.”

  Hearing him as he came out of the room, Jimmy shrugged. “You would have done the procedure if I wasn’t here.”

  “Point was, you were, and you are far more up on the procedure than I am.” Shayne had always given people their due. “Fact is, you’re up on a lot more procedures than I am here. I could really use a man like you.”

  “So you keep telling me.” Exhausted after operating on what had amounted to a near sleepless night, Jimmy still found the strength to laugh. In the past week and a half, Shayne had never missed an opportunity to tell him how satisfying it was to practice medicine in a place where he was really needed, where patients were more than just names on a roster. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as wanted as I do right now.”

  Stripping off his surgical scrubs, Shayne set them on a chair. “Well, I certainly can’t bribe you with money, but there’s no beating the satisfaction. Think about it,” were his parting words before he returned to his patient.

  There were no words she could say to this man she’d snubbed and ignored for the last few days that would begin to express her gratitude to him for saving her grandmother’s life. Any attempt just seemed to get stuck in her throat.

  Clearing it, she indicated the back room. “May I see her?”

  “Sure.” Shedding his mask and tossing it on the chair on top of Shayne’s scrubs, he started to lead her back. “Follow me.”

  April caught his arm. When he looked at her quizzically, she blurted the first thing that came to mind. Better something than nothing. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  He smiled at her. “Don’t worry about it. Your eyes already did.”

  Linking his fingers through hers, Jimmy led her into the room where Shayne normally performed the minor surgeries that were a day-to-day occurrence in Hades. Clean, pristine, the room didn’t look as if anything more sophisticated than simple suturing could be undertaken here.

  But it had. And she was eternally grateful.

  April caught her breath as she looked down at her grandmother, her eyes closed, looking ghostly pale against the white sheets around her.

  Gran was so still. Without realizing it, April squeezed Jimmy’s hand.

  Alison adjusted the white blanket covering the woman. “She’ll sleep probably until morning. I’ll stay with her,” Alison told April, then looked at her brother. “Why don’t you take April home?”

  April didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay here. In case Gran needed her. “I—”

  Jimmy was taking her arm as Shayne cut short her protest. “Doctor’s order.”

  April looked from one face to another. She couldn’t argue with all three of them and she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “Maybe I am a little tired.”

  “Now you’re being sensible,” Jimmy told her. He picked up the jacket she didn’t remember shedding and slipped it onto her shoulders.

  April let herself be led out, feeling oddly numb all over.

  “We’ll use your car,” Jimmy was saying. She realized he was holding his hand out for her keys. It took her a minute to locate them.

  It was as if every bone in her body suddenly sagged as she sat in the passenger seat. She was exhausted, yet wired. Stealing a glance toward Jimmy’s profile as he started the car, she let out a long, slow breath.

  There was a lot of unfinished business between them. To have left it up in the air was cowardly.

  Like her father when he’d just left them one morning.

  It wasn’t fair to Jimmy. She needed to explain things, to make them right. Especially now since he’d saved her grandmother.

  But yet when she looked for the words, nothing came. Her mind felt blank. Numb and blank.

  What did she say? How did she start? How did she end?

  The car had stopped moving. They were at her door, she realized, bewildered at how the trip could have gone so fast.

  “We’re here,” he told her.

  She nodded, getting out. Walking to the door on someone else’s legs. Nothing felt as if it belonged to her. Not her body, not her feelings. Not her thoughts. Everything was jumbled, disoriented.

  Sensing her tension, Jimmy stopped at her door and looked at her. She shouldn’t be alone. “Want me to stay with you for a while?”

  “No.”

  The single word came out like a defensive line-backer barreling over him. Jimmy backed away. “All right. Good night, then.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned around to look at her, waiting for a final ruling. Dragging her hand through her hair, April offered him a rueful smile.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that—when I thought about Gran dying and that it was my fault—”

  He came back to her side. “How could it have been your fault?”

  April unlocked the front door. Didn’t he see? “I didn’t make her go to Anchorage. That was the reason I came back here and I just let her float along, accepting her excuses, thinking that maybe I had made too big a deal of it after all. I should have known better—”

  He saw the anguish in her eyes. “April, you can’t bully everybody.”

  Her hand on the doorknob, she laughed shortly. “That’s just it, I do, I bully everyone, but when it counted—” When it counted, she thought, she’d failed. Miserably. She knew her grandmother had needed to get further medical attention and she’d let her down.

  Sympathy stirred within him. Jimmy caressed her face. “April, you’re not in charge of the world, or even of your grandmother. People make mistakes and you can’t second guess every situation.”

  She wasn’t going to allow him to whitewash this for her. “But I came here to take care of her and I did a lousy job—”

  Jimmy placed his finger to her lips, stopping her. “You got her to the clinic in time,” he reminded her. “And in the long run, that’s all that counts. You saved her life as much as I did, April. More, because if you hadn’t brought her in time, I couldn’t have operated on her.”

  “You do have a hell of a bedside manner,” she said softly.

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled at her. “See, I told you I did.”

  She pressed her lips together as she finally turned the doorknob and opened the front door. It was dark within the post office.

  As dark as she’d felt inside, sitting in the clinic, waiting to hear if Gran was alive or dead.

  Jimmy heard her shallow breathing though he sensed she was trying very hard to not let go. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate his seeing her cry, but knew, too, that right now, she needed not to be the strong one. For one moment in time, April needed to release the hold she had on her emotions.

  He touched her shoulder. “April.”

  Very gently, he turned her around to face him. Angrily defensive, she jerked her face away, but with his thumb beneath her chin, he forced her to turn around and look at him. “It’s okay to cry.”

  “I never cry,” she
told him.

  The next moment, she did.

  Jimmy held her close to him as she sobbed. Her body trembled as huge, body-racking sobs shook it. Jimmy stroked her back, then, picking her up into his arms, he walked slowly to the rear of the room. Carrying her up the stairs, he murmured soft endearments that somehow managed to penetrate through the haze of tears, guilt and relief that wound themselves tightly around her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The instant Jimmy brought her to her room and set her down on her bed, it was as if a dam had broken loose within her. April forgot about everything else, about the promises she’d made to herself. About protecting herself.

  She couldn’t be alone tonight. And the only person she wanted to be with was Jimmy.

  April caught his arm as he began to straighten, bringing him closer to her.

  “Stay with me,” she said quietly.

  Thinking she only wanted him to hold her, Jimmy sat on the edge of the bed and gathered her against him. “I’m not going anywhere.” Leaning over, he lightly brushed his lips on her forehead.

  April reached for him. He saw the silent plea in her eyes, the need for comfort. The need for someone to help her make the world disappear.

  The need for him.

  Even if he’d thought of resisting, he couldn’t. Not when he’d spent the past few days trying to talk himself into not wanting her and knowing that he was lying. It had seemed ironic to him, Murphy’s Law at its finest and most diabolical. The one woman he’d actually wanted in his life, the one woman he was willing to rethink his entire philosophy of living for, and she’d suddenly done an about-face and made it clear that she hadn’t wanted him.

  But now she did and there was no room for pride, for principles, or for watching his back.

  He brought his mouth down to hers and kissed her with all the longing that had haunted him the past three days. The past eternity.

  It was different this time, different than the time they had spent in the cabin. Separated by several days, it seemed as if that had all happened in another lifetime. That was child’s play. This was deadly serious.