Passionate Rivals

by Radclyffe

  “Right.” Emmett gave her a long look.

  Syd flushed. She hadn’t meant to say so much. Emmett knew she’d started somewhere else before Franklin, that interning with Dani and Jerry hadn’t really been her first time. And Emmett knew she was avoiding talking about it. She hadn’t meant to reveal anything at all, and now she’d left openings for places she didn’t want to go.

  “There’s the chief,” Syd said gratefully as Quinn Maguire, Honor Blake, and a teenage girl in a dark blue T-shirt and martial arts pants came through the ER entrance. A bloodstained four-by-four was taped to the girl’s forehead, and her left upper eyelid was almost swollen closed. Maguire had one hand on the shoulder of the teen, whose red-blond hair and deep brown eyes were a carbon copy of Honor Blake’s. No question about that relationship.

  Emmett picked up her pace, and Syd followed just half a step behind. This wasn’t an ordinary ER consult. The three of them were clearly a family. Maybe Maguire didn’t want anyone else there. After all, she’d called Emmett directly, and no matter what Emmett said, Emmett was clearly Maguire’s guy.

  “Hey, McCabe,” Quinn said, “Arly here took a chunk of wood to the forehead. She’s got a pretty good laceration and some debris that needs cleaning out.”

  Honor added, “She’s going to need some sutures.”

  Emmett looked from Quinn to Honor. “You want me to get plastics?”

  “No reason,” Honor said.

  Syd was impressed. Most parents, doctors or not, freaked out when their kids had facial lacerations. Even though the face healed better than any other part of the body and, in all but the worst cases, healed without too much scarring as long as the closure was clean and well aligned and the proper sutures were used. Of all the areas of the body, the face was the most forgiving. Still, any injury that might potentially leave a scar no matter how faint, especially to a girl—even though she’d never understood why that made a difference—was cause for frantic anxiety. Maguire and Blake had to be a little worried, but they didn’t show it.

  Everyone looked at Emmett, who took a step forward and held out her hand to Arly.

  “Hey, Arly. I’m Emmett McCabe. I met you a couple times at the barbecues.”

  The girl smiled briefly and shook her hand. “I remember. You were a pretty awesome volleyball spiker. I think you almost nailed Quinn a couple of times at the net.”

  Emmett blushed. “Yeah, not intentional, I swear.”

  “So it’s not a big deal. Just a scratch.” Arly shot Honor and Quinn a look Syd had seen on a million teenagers that said, My parents are making a big deal out of this, and they’re embarrassing me.

  “Probably,” Emmett said easily. “How about I take a look so you can all get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Arly said. “That’s a plan.”

  Any lingering anxiety vanished as Emmett effortlessly connected with the teen. Emmett was good, very good, just as Syd had known she would be. All of a sudden, Syd wanted to be anywhere else.

  “Well,” Syd said quietly, “I don’t think you need me here—”

  “It’s fine,” Quinn said. “Maybe you could give Emmett a hand…”

  “Of course,” Syd said quickly. If Maguire wanted the full VIP treatment, she’d get it. Besides, Arly was a neat kid, and this time, she didn’t mind playing assist to Emmett. Better that than suturing up the chief’s daughter.

  “I’ll get her signed in.” Honor touched Arly’s cheek. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” Arly said, just barely hiding her obvious affection beneath a patina of boredom.

  “Hey.” A very pregnant blond nurse in a powder-blue smock hurried over. “What are you guys doing here? Arly, what happened, baby?”

  “I’m cool, Linda,” Arly said. “Stupid board split weird and a chunk hit me in the head during my test.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Linda shook her head. “And here I thought somebody got to you while you were sparring.”

  Arly looked affronted. “Are you kidding me? Nobody hits me in the face when I’m sparring.” Arly caught Syd’s questioning look. “Junior black belt test. I rocked it. Well, I was rocking it until that stupid board cracked in a million pieces.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” Syd said. “I didn’t get to test until I was sixteen, so I never got my junior rank. You’re what, fifteen?”

  “Fourteen,” Arly said. “Almost.”

  Quinn squeezed Arly’s shoulder. “Quick learner.”

  Syd laughed. “Obviously.”

  “So do you still train?” Arly asked, her injury clearly already forgotten.

  “Not as much as I’d like anymore. I don’t have as much time.”

  “The dojo’s only ten minutes from here. Maybe you could come by.”

  “Maybe.” Syd glanced at Emmett. “I’ll find us an empty cubicle and get set up.”

  “Thanks,” Emmett said. “Could you grab some—”

  “Three-oh Vicryl, six-oh Prolene?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Hey, Arly,” Syd said. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Sure.”

  Emmett hung back a few steps while Syd and Arly went ahead to a treatment cubicle. She lowered her voice and said to Quinn, “Her lid’s pretty swollen. Do I need ophtho to check her eye?”

  Quinn shook her head. “No. She had protective eyewear on for the board break.” For an instant, she closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “We dodged a bullet, I think.”

  “I can get plastics here in fifteen minutes,” Emmett said again. She had no pride in a situation like this. Whatever made the parents feel most comfortable was fine by her.

  “Nervous, McCabe?” Quinn said.

  “No. But you know…face and all.”

  “It’s a straightforward linear laceration. Deep, but everything’s favorable. Besides, I wouldn’t let you do it if I didn’t know you’d do a good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Great. Arly is a champ.” Quinn clapped her on the back. “Just tell her everything you’re going to do before you do it, and she’ll be fine. So you good?”

  “I’m good.” As soon as she said it, Emmett realized she really was. She felt good in a way she hadn’t in a long time. That was weird, but what the hell, why question it. “I better get going before Stevens steals my case.”

  Quinn laughed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Need me in there?” Linda called as Emmett and Quinn walked toward the treatment cubicle.

  “Nope, we’re good,” Emmett said.

  “Great.” Linda paused, put a hand on her lower back, and grimaced. An instant later she strode briskly in the direction of the ER admitting area. “I’ve got a boatload of walk-ins to get processed. Yell if you need anything.”

  “Will do.” Emmett pulled the curtain aside, looking after Linda. “I thought she was a flight nurse.”

  “She is,” Quinn said. “Honor grounded her until after the delivery.” She smiled at Arly. “Doing okay?”

  “Yep.” Arly shifted and peered past Quinn. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Paperwork.”

  “Oh.”

  Syd had already opened the suture tray, and Arly sat half propped up on the stretcher, a sheet pulled up to her waist, her hands folded in her lap. She looked totally comfortable. Syd had removed the gauze covering Arly’s laceration too. A couple of inches above her left eye, a three-inch horizontal gash ran across the center of her forehead. The wound wasn’t bleeding now, but as Quinn had said, it was pretty deep. Quinn had been right about it being favorable too—the laceration couldn’t have been in a better spot or orientation to heal with minimal scarring. The knot of tension in Emmett’s midsection eased a fraction.

  “We can wait for your other mom,” Emmett said.

  Arly shook her head. “She’ll be here.”

  “If you’re sure,” Emmett said.

  “Totally.” Arly sounded calm and cool. Then she frowned. “My only real problem is, I
didn’t get to finish my test. I could have.” She shot Quinn a half-wounded, half-affronted look. “But Quinn wouldn’t let me.”

  Quinn leaned against the wall just inside the door. She shook her head, clearly unfazed by Arly’s outrage. “Arly, you’d have had a hard time sparring with blood running in your eye.”

  “It wasn’t bleeding that much.”

  “Didn’t have to be,” Quinn said. “Blood means you’re done. You know the rules.”

  “Yeah,” Arly sighed.

  “Okay, you’re going to want to hold still a second,” Syd said. “I want to put some Betadine around the laceration so Emmett can get started. This shouldn’t hurt.” As she worked, she added, “No point giving your sparring partner an advantage, you know. Especially during your black belt test.”

  “I suppose.” Arly was silent for a second. “Okay, yeah. I get it. But I could have—”

  “You can test again in two weeks,” Quinn said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what Sensei said, right?”

  Arly angled her head to stare at Emmett. “The stitches will be out by then, right?”

  Emmett pulled on gloves. “Long gone.”

  “Here you go,” Syd murmured, handing Emmett a syringe with a twenty-five gauge needle attached. “One percent lidocaine with epi.”

  Syd indicated the bottle on the counter and Emmett leaned down to check the label. She’d seen even the best of them grab the wrong drug in an emergency, and if she hadn’t drawn a medication up herself, she always double-checked. Because if she administered it, she was responsible. No one else.

  “Hey, Arly,” Emmett said. “Are you allergic to anything?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever had lidocaine before? It’s—”

  “A local anesthetic. Yup. Once.” Arly grinned at Quinn. “That’s how my parents met.”

  “Is that right?” Emmett carefully did not look at Quinn. This could get embarrassing fast. “I’m going to inject this now. It might sting for a couple of seconds.” As she started to infiltrate the edges of the wound, she said, “So what happened—the first time?”

  “I had another cut on my face.”

  Arly didn’t even wince as Emmett moved from the edges of the laceration into the deeper tissues. Quinn was right—she was a champ. A half-inch splinter of wood was immediately visible buried in the subcutaneous layer, but otherwise the wound looked clean. When Emmett was done injecting the local, she capped and handed the syringe to Syd, who disposed of it. “Thanks, Syd…if you want to head out—”

  “That’s okay,” Syd said quietly. “I’ll stay.”

  “Thanks,” Emmett repeated. Syd didn’t need to stay, and she certainly wasn’t getting anything out of assisting on something as simple as closing a laceration, but it was nice having her there. Emmett felt comfortable doing what she was doing, but still, Arly was a VIP patient. Her parents couldn’t get any more VIP. Maybe Syd knew she’d be a little nervous, even if she’d never let it show.

  “So Quinn sewed you up then, right?” Emmett asked, hoping to distract Arly as she slowly extracted the sliver of wood.

  “Yeah—hey, is that the wood?”

  So much for distraction. Emmett held the mega-splinter up between the forceps. “That’s it.”

  “Just in time,” Honor said from the doorway.

  “Wow, Mom,” Arly said. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Oh, totally.” Honor lasered in on Emmett. “Did you get it all?”

  “I’m going to check again, but it looks like it.” Inwardly, Emmett smiled at the first sign of a nervous parent. Honor and Quinn were both doing really well, considering nobody liked to see their kid hurt, and two docs used to handling emergencies themselves must be struggling not to take over. She cleared away the small bit of clot from the depths of the wound and carefully checked for any other slivers of wood.

  “Just that one piece,” she said, looking from Arly to her parents. “Everything is clear. All we have to do now is put in a row or two of stitches, and you’re outta here.”

  “So anyhow, Quinn fixed me up last time,” Arly went on, obviously warming to her story, “and my mom fell for her right away.”

  Quinn coughed.

  Honor laughed. “I think that’s probably TMI, baby.”

  Arly grinned, and despite the fact she was practically a carbon copy of Honor in looks, there was something about the grin and the glint in her eye that reminded Emmett of Quinn. Emmett caught Arly’s eye and raised a brow. Arly looked pleased with herself.

  “Sparring then too?” Emmett tied the first suture and Syd leaned in and cut for her. Med student work, and Emmett appreciated again that Syd’d hung around. Anyone else, she might’ve thought they were trying to score points with the chief, but she couldn’t imagine that was Syd’s style. She was just doing it to be nice, or maybe…Maybe she wanted to hang out with Emmett. Emmett’s stomach tightened at the thought. Maybe?

  “Soccer,” Arly said.

  “Huh?”

  “I got hurt playing soccer.” Arly laughed. “Then Quinn started coaching our team so she could see my mom—”

  “Hey, Arl,” Quinn said, “it’s not too late for us to sign you up for summer camp in Canada, you know.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Arly said with an exaggerated sigh.

  “Okay,” Emmett said, straightening. “All done. I’m going to put some Steri-Strips on this which you should leave in place…” She glanced at Honor and Quinn. “Well, I guess you know what to do with that.”

  “We’ll take it from here,” Honor said, squeezing Arly’s foot beneath the sheet. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Emmett smoothed out the last Steri-Strip, wrapped up the instrument tray, and took off her gloves. “If you need me to check it again for any reason, just let me know.”

  Arly swung her legs over the side of the stretcher, preparing to jump down, and Quinn stepped in, murmuring, “Take it easy.”

  “I’m good,” Arly said, but she put her hand on Quinn’s and eased off the stretcher. Quinn’s arm came around her shoulders, and for just a second, Arly leaned into her.

  Emmett stopped at the nurses’ station to write up her part of the chart, and Syd joined her.

  “Nice kid,” Emmett said.

  “Yeah, she’s super.”

  “Thanks for hanging around. I appreciated the moral support.”

  Syd leaned her arm on the counter and gave Emmett a look. “I doubt you needed it.”

  “You know how it is with patients like that. Talk about doubling up. Double the pressure, more like it.”

  “Oh, I know,” Syd said. “I had the chief of medicine in the ER one night with a lacerated tendon. He was chopping carrots, slipped, and cut a distal flexor tendon.”

  “Oh, man. At least it wasn’t the chief of surgery.”

  Syd rolled her eyes. “You’d have thought it was. I mean, I get it. Nobody wants to have a finger out of commission for six weeks, but by the time I was done repairing it, I had half the hospital in the room.”

  Emmett whistled. “You did it in the ER?”

  “I got lucky—I could see both ends. I called the hand guy who was covering that night, and he was tied up at another hospital and told me to go ahead.”

  “Nice,” Emmett said. “Nothing better than being handed the reins by an attending. Guy do okay?”

  “He did. Believe me, I was following him through rehab every step of the way.”

  “Well, this was nothing to that.”

  “Hey, kids are tough, awake like that. No matter how together they are.” Syd shook her head. “And with both parents in the room, both of them emergency docs? Least I could do was to make sure you didn’t get into trouble.”

  Emmett laughed. Syd was actually teasing her. After the day they’d spent circling each other, she felt as if she’d just run a track full of hurdles and was crossing the finish line. Pleasure zipped through her. “Oh, right. Because, you know…putting in a couple sutu
res is so challenging.”

  “In a kid, sure can be. Maybe you should think of peds surgery,” Syd said, then throttled it. What the hell was she talking about? She didn’t need more competition. “You were really good with her.”

  “I thought about it,” Emmett said. “I really like kids. But the parents…” She waggled her hand. “They can be hard to deal with. So no.”

  “You’re right about that.” Syd understood that all too well.

  “Oh,” Emmett said, scrawling her e-sig on the tablet, “and when you get the young ones, the babies, and you know they’re not going to make it? Nope, I don’t want to have to deal with that all the time.”

  A chill spread through Syd’s chest. A cold so deep for an instant she couldn’t move. “Yeah, well, part of the job. Right?”

  “I guess,” Emmett said, closing the chart. “Anyhow, I’ll stick to trauma. What about you, where are you going after next year?” Emmett asked casually since every time she probed even a little bit, Syd closed the door on her.

  “I don’t know,” Syd said. “I haven’t quite decided. Maybe trauma.”

  “Huh,” Emmett said, trying to look unfazed, “really.”

  Syd laughed. “No. I like the rush, but I don’t really want to spend my life putting in chest tubes and taking out ruptured spleens.”

  “Come on,” Emmett said in mock outrage. “We do more than that. Ruptured aortas, emergency trachs, bowel injuries. Plus, the resuscitation and—”

  Syd held up a hand. “You don’t have to sell me.”

  “Not to mention pericardial windows,” Emmett said, taking a chance that Syd wasn’t still ticked off about her taking that case in the morning. Not that she’d actually taken it. It had been handed to her, after all.

  “Yeah,” Syd said archly, “but while you were making a teeny little hole in the belly, I was drilling one in the skull.”

  Emmett smiled. “Yeah, that was cool.”

  Syd nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, it was.”

  “So,” Emmett said, “you heading home now?”