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  It was what she was, Jolene thought as she watched the doors and waited for them to spring open, and what she would always be.

  If she didn’t have Amanda to provide and care for, Jolene would have opted to go work in a third world country where her dedication and knowledge would have been truly appreciated and there wouldn’t have been a host of overbearing doctors to deal with. Just perhaps one within a thousand-mile radius.

  Her grandmother had been such a dedicated woman in her youth, selflessly giving herself up to the hard life found in underdeveloped regions in Africa. She’d been a Red Cross nurse when her grandfather had met her.

  Jolene smiled to herself. Her grandfather had been the one doctor that was the exception to her rule.

  Just then, the rear doors burst open.

  The next moment, the rear section of the emergency room was filled with the sight, sounds and smell of what had been a near fatal disaster.

  “Kind of like when the Native Americans attacked the covered wagons in the old Westerns, isn’t it?”

  The comment came from directly behind her. A shiver danced down her neck and shoulder blades in response to the whiff of warm breath that accompanied his words.

  What was he, standing right on top of her?

  Turning almost all the way around, Jolene saw that Rebecca’s knight in tarnished armor had somehow gotten directly behind her without her noticing. Served her right for letting her thoughts wander.

  Jolene turned back toward the incoming gurneys a split second after giving the man a disparaging look.

  “Except that we’re supposed to help them, not shoot at them,” she retorted icily.

  Nurses and doctors were pairing themselves off, bracketing gurneys and the attendants that came in with them. Mac paused just long enough to look quizzically at the nurse with the killer body. “Have I offended you somehow?”

  “I don’t think now’s the time to hit on me, Doctor,” she told him crisply. She was already hurrying away from him. “We have work to do.”

  For a moment Mac was speechless. He’d been put in his place royally. Put in his place within a tiny, obscure box and had the lid slammed down on him. Tight.

  His interest was seriously piqued.

  But interest was going to have to wait. Though gifted at multitasking from an early age, Mac gave the emergency situation his entire focus. He fell into place beside the fourth gurney as it came through the doors and began shooting questions at the young female paramedic closest to him.

  For the next hour, it felt as if someone had unleashed a dam. An endless stream of injured party-goers kept coming and coming. Each time it seemed as if that had been the last of them, another ambulance arrived, bearing another casualty.

  “What are we, the only hospital in the area?” one of the doctors who had been called down groused.

  Overhearing as she hurried to another bed, Wanda answered, “We’re the only ones whose trauma area is equipped to handle this kind of volume. Dr. Mac, they need you in Trauma Room Three,” she called out.

  Mac looked at the nurse practitioner working with him on a twenty-year-old woman who seemed to have every part of her body pierced with something. The piercing in her thigh hadn’t been of her choice. He and Martha had worked for over ten minutes, making sure the wound the vocal party-goer had sustained wouldn’t begin to gush again. It appeared to be stable.

  “Go ahead,” Martha urged. “I can handle this. It’s all over but the shouting.”

  Considering that the young woman they were working on was hurling four-letter words at them regarding the man who’d thrown the party, Mac thought it rather an apt description of the situation.

  “I’m all yours,” he told Wanda, hurrying behind her.

  “Be still my heart,” the woman quipped, covering her ample chest with a rubber gloved hand. She brought Mac to a man, who looked as if he’d been on the bottom of the pile in the pyramid after the balcony’s collapse.

  This, Mac quickly assessed, was going to take more than simple suturing and cleaning.

  Someone brushed against his elbow in the tight space around the gurney and as he automatically looked, his eyes met the new nurse’s.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  She seemed to take the question as an affront to her abilities. “Fine.”

  Mac felt as if he’d just been fired on at point-blank range.

  He looked at Wanda, who shrugged in response to his silent question. She didn’t seem to know what was wrong with the new nurse, either.

  For the following three and a half hours, Mac found himself hip deep in sutures, X rays, blood and chaos. There was no time to think, only to react and pray that responses—correct responses—were ingrained. Several times during the frenetic dance from patient to patient, Mac had looked up to see the new nurse close by, ministering to the wounded.

  Twice they found themselves working over the same injured victim.

  She worked well, he noted. And quickly, as if she’d been in these situations countless times before. He’d known new nurses to buckle under pressure. But then, he remembered, Jorge had said she was a transfer from San Francisco General. That made her somewhat seasoned.

  He couldn’t help wondering why she’d transferred. She was obviously good at her job, The brittle voice she’d directed at him was nowhere in evidence when she spoke to a terrified woman, who was afraid she was going to lose her leg. Jolene stood, holding the woman’s hand as he worked feverishly to stabilize the woman in order to rush her into surgery.

  “Okay,” Mac announced the moment Wanda told him there was an O.R. free, “she’s ready to go up.”

  Frightened brown eyes shifted toward him. “Am I going to lose it?” the woman cried, hysteria barely contained in her voice.

  “Not a chance,” he told her, smiling. “You’ll be dancing in three months.”

  His words earned him another cool look from Jolene as she helped push the gurney out into the hall and toward the elevator. Now what had he said?

  He had no time to ponder on it. Someone else was calling for him. Stripping off the yellow paper gown, he slipped into the one that Martha Hayes was holding out for him.

  “Let’s roll,” he said to the young nurse.

  Eventually, just as Mac’s back was beginning to ache in fierce protest—reminding him of the strain he’d received over a dozen years ago on the football field—the chaos receded as abruptly as it had begun.

  He glanced over toward the rear doors, holding his breath, unwilling to release his hold on the adrenaline that was keeping him going.

  The doors remained closed.

  “That’s the last of them, Dr. Mac,” Wanda told him wearily.

  Mac rotated his neck, trying to reduce the tension that had knotted itself there. “Gee, just when we were beginning to have fun,” he muttered.

  With relief, he shed the last of an endless series of yellow paper gowns he’d hastily put on these last few hours and then glanced at his watch. The balcony collapse had eaten away his time.

  So much for a leisurely pace, he thought. If he was particularly quick about it, he had just enough time to go home, shower and change before he had to leave again.

  As he turned to throw away the last gown, Jolene passed him on her way to the other end of the E.R. She spared him a look that could have served as the standard for temperatures used in cryogenic refrigeration.

  Mac looked at Wanda. “Are there icicles on me?”

  Wanda laughed, pouring herself a mug of coffee that had to be thicker than plasma by now. “She doesn’t care for doctors.”

  He watched the way Jolene’s trim figure moved as she walked. Somewhere, there had to be a mold in God’s supply closet marked Perfect. “So I’ve heard.”

  Wanda noted the way he looked after the other woman. She knew that look. It had interest written all over it. “But she’s a damn good nurse.”

  “Looks it,” he agreed. He wasn’t thinking about the woman tending to his fevered
brow. Not in that context, anyway.

  Wanda chuckled and shook her head. “You’re wasting your time, Dr. Mac. That’s one lady who isn’t interested in you playing doctor.”

  He grinned. “Yet,” he corrected.

  Wanda counted herself among the number who formed Harrison MacKenzie’s fan club. Not because of his male appeal or the sexy way he could look at a woman—Wanda had been happily married to the same man now for thirty-two years—but because Dr. Mac was good people. The best. And excellent at what he did. She’d seen him walk that extra mile or so on more than one occasion. For that reason, she didn’t want to see his ego bruised.

  “Dr. Mac, I wouldn’t want to see you fall flat on your—” Tilting her head, her eyes washed over his slim hips and taut posterior. She grinned broadly as she concluded. “Face.”

  He patted her arm, still watching Jolene as she disappeared behind a curtained area. “Not to worry, Wanda. I have no intentions of doing that.”

  “To stay on the safe side, I won’t watch.” Wanda laughed, turning back to her work.

  Mac, on the other hand, had never played it safe. Not on this playing field at any rate. He didn’t intend to start now.

  Chapter Two

  Mac had almost missed him.

  In a hurry to get back into his civilian attire so he could get home in time for his date, Mac had walked right by the supply closet and almost missed the sound entirely.

  It wasn’t as if there was no other noise within the area. Even an E.R. at rest still hummed with the regular sounds of human activity.

  But this sound was different.

  This was whimpering—like a small, wounded animal that was afraid of being found.

  Mac stopped, listening for a direction, a source to the sound and abruptly realized that he had walked right by it without knowing it.

  Backtracking, he paused before the supply door, listening more closely.

  Debating.

  If he was wrong, if the sound he heard wasn’t the kind caused by fear but instead a little squeal of pleasure escaping, then he would be intruding on territory he himself had traversed more than once. Within each hospital there were little out of the way pockets to which members of the staff occasionally escaped whenever they found themselves being drawn together by feelings that couldn’t be put on hold.

  He listened intently. No noise. Maybe he’d been mistaken after all.

  Mac was all set to chalk the whole thing up to his imagination when the sound came again, this time even more muffled than before. Even more distressed.

  Not his imagination, he thought. He just hoped he wasn’t about to walk in on something he shouldn’t.

  Holding his breath, Mac slowly eased the door open and took a quick look inside the unlit, almost airless enclosure.

  At first glance, there appeared to be no one there. Only shelves of neatly stacked bed linens and blankets crowding against one another.

  And then he saw him. A little boy of no more than about five. If he was six, it was a particularly small six.

  The boy was huddled on the floor in the far corner of the closet, his head buried in a towel, the towel firmly pressed against his knees.

  Well, that would explain the muffled sound, Mac thought. But not what the boy was doing there in the first place.

  Mac glanced again at his watch. Minutes were melting away and so was his safety margin. At this rate, there wasn’t going to be time for a shower. Probably the only thing he could manage would be to change his shirt. If he left now.

  The debate whether to leave or to linger a few more minutes was over with in less than a heartbeat. There were more important things right now than getting a clean shirt.

  “Hey partner,” Mac said softly, edging his way into the small area, “trying out our towels to see if they’re soft?”

  The small, dark head jerked up, then down again, as if the boy had remembered something and pressed his face against the towel again. He said nothing. Mac could have sworn the boy was trying to disappear into the very weave.

  Feeling the wall, Mac found the light and flipped it on, then closed the door behind him. He took a couple of more steps toward the boy, approaching him the way he might a frightened, wounded animal he didn’t want to scare away.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re the strong, silent type.” Standing in front of him now, Mac crouched down before the boy, who seemed to physically shrink away even further. “You know, you’re going to suffocate if you burrow any further into that towel.” Mac addressed his words to the top of the boy’s dark head. “I’m Dr. Mac. They let me play here sometimes. What’s your name?”

  There was no response.

  Mac took it in stride. Shyness was not something new to him.

  “Nameless, huh? Okay, Nameless, I know there’s got to be someone looking for you so why don’t we blow this Popsicle stand and get out where they’ve got a better chance of seeing you?”

  Still holding the towel to part of his face, the boy raised his head, allowing one dark eye to warily look up at Mac.

  There was a bloodstain slowly coming through the corner of the towel closest to the boy’s face. The boy was hurt. Had he come in with the balcony victims and had somehow been missed?

  Mac didn’t think that very likely. The youngest person treated from the party had been a nineteen-year-old. This one didn’t look old enough to spell “balcony,” much less be on one while a bunch of so-called adults did their best to emulate a frat house prank.

  Mac deliberately kept his voice calm, cheery, knowing that anything less would send the boy withdrawing even further into himself. A traumatized patient was just that much harder to deal with.

  He thought about his nephew and pretended he was talking to Kirby. His sister’s youngest had always been more than a handful.

  “Ah, I see an eye. Is there another one on the other side?”

  Gently Mac began to coax the towel away from the boy’s face. The bandage that was barely resting against the little boy’s cheek had been applied by an amateur, very possibly the boy himself, and was about to come off any second. There was blood, both dried and fresh all along the small face.

  Whatever had happened, Mac judged, had happened fairly recently.

  When he reached for the bandage, the boy pulled back, his eyes wide, frightened. Mac waited a beat.

  “C’mon, Nameless, let me see. I’m a better doctor than I look.” His eyes met the boy’s and his tone softened even more. It was soft, comforting. Questions filled his head, but they could wait for a little while. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

  The boy whimpered again in fearful anticipation. He was shaking, Mac realized, but he didn’t shrink away this time and allowed himself to be examined.

  It wasn’t pretty. There was a four-inch jagged laceration running along his left cheek. It had just missed his eye.

  Mac felt like someone had stuck a red-hot poker in his stomach.

  “You’re not part of the people who just came in, are you?” he murmured. It was a rhetorical question. The boy stared at him with wide eyes. “No, I guess not.” An urge to hug the boy swept over Mac, but he knew that would only frighten him even more. No sudden moves, no matter how altruistic. “Did someone do this to you?” The boy’s silence answered Mac’s question for him. Had it been an accident, he was certain that the boy, frightened or not, would have volunteered the information. “Okay, come with me. We’re going to make you good as new.”

  Mac didn’t bother adding that the promise couldn’t be fulfilled immediately, that it would take some time and more than one operation to make things right, but those were details a frightened little boy didn’t need to hear right now. What he needed most was comfort.

  He could do that much.

  Very gently, he picked the boy up in his arms. Turning, Mac left the confines of the supply closet and walked out into the corridor.

  The first person he saw was Nurse Icicle. It figured. But he didn’t have time to look around for someone else
, someone he actually worked well with. The boy needed to have this tended to now, before an infection set in. If it hadn’t started to already.

  Reaching out, Mac caught her by the shoulder before the woman could continue hurrying away to another trauma room.

  “Jolene, right?”

  She recognized the voice immediately. Shrugging him off, she squeezed out a terse “Nurse DeLuca,” between her teeth as she turned around.

  And stopped dead.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at the frightened little boy in Mac’s arms. Her mother’s heart twisted a little within her chest. A child in distress always got to her. “What happened to him?”

  “Not sure,” Mac replied glibly, then looked down at the small being he was holding against him, his voice comforting as he added, “but we’re going to undo it, right, Nameless?”

  Jolene stared at the world-class Romeo in front of her, torn between her readiness to dislike him and what she saw. “You don’t even know his name?”

  She looked around to see if there was a worried parent hovering around somewhere close by, but there were only the same players she’d been seeing for more than the last three hours.

  No one looked as if they’d lost anything but time and some skin.

  He really, really didn’t care for her tone or the cool way she regarded him. As if he’d gotten his degree from the back of a comic book. But now wasn’t the time to put her in her place or to even find out just what her problem actually was.

  “I know he’s bleeding and needs help. Anything else we can look into later.” He nodded past the regular rows of beds within the E.R. kept for standard cases and toward the trauma rooms. “Are there any beds available down here?”