But Trey continued to explain what he was doing to the students, and Callie listened and watched as he skillfully wielded the tiny scalpel she’d handed him.
His technique was flawless. As always she was awed by his incredible dexterity, his seemingly effortless expertise. To use such a tiny instrument so effectively in one of the most crucial parts of the brain was true genius. She never tired of watching him perform.
Nobody else did, either. To say that Dr. Trey Weldon, Tri-State Medical Center’s extraordinarily gifted neurosurgeon, was respected by his peers, by his lesser colleagues, by the establishment powers that be and everybody else, was a pallid understatement.
Trey Weldon was a star, a “surgical supernova” to quote a dazzled science reporter from the local Pittsburgh newspaper. The article exalted Trey’s operating prowess and his impressive credentials, also mentioning the determination of the medical center’s administrators to recruit him eighteen months ago.
Callie had saved that article and read it from time to time, particularly when she felt herself in danger of forgetting just how far she was—and would always be—from Trey Weldon’s world. Beginning, appropriately enough, with their origins.
The Weldon family descended from landed gentry in colonial Virginia, whose fortune had been made generations ago while Callie’s forebears were still trying to eke out a living as peasants in the old country. And though different backgrounds often didn’t matter, Callie knew bloodlines meant a lot to the aristocratic Weldon family.
It would certainly matter to them that her blood was the wrong shade of blue—that is, blue-collar blue. She just knew it would, from what she’d gleaned from that newspaper article and some of the casual comments made by Trey himself.
The son of Winston and Laura Weldon—she’d learned his parents’ names from the article, too—had nothing socially in common with her, the daughter of Jack and Nancy Sheely, whose grandparents had left poverty in Ireland and Russia to live in poverty in Pittsburgh. Their brave move and hard work had eventually paid off for their children and grandchildren, but high society they weren’t.
The Weldons were and had been Southern aristocracy for a couple of centuries.
“Holding up okay?” Trey’s inquiry nearly startled Callie into dropping a gauze sponge. Thankfully, her reflexes were too sharp to permit such a lapse.
“Me?” she murmured, trying to suppress her astonishment.
Trey had ceased lecturing and was asking her a personal question. If she was holding up okay. That had never happened before.
She’d been with him in surgery for nine or ten hours straight without him once mentioning thirst, hunger, sore muscles—or even the need for a bathroom break. He didn’t acknowledge such mundane concerns, for himself or others.
“Sheely?” he prompted, and his brow furrowed with what might have been concern.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. But she was perplexed by his unusual solicitousness. Did she look ready to drop or something? Or to drop something? He wouldn’t like that!
“Honest,” she added quickly.
Trey nodded his head and went on operating.
While others withered around him, Trey Weldon just kept on going.
“To watch Trey Weldon operate on a brain is to experience a virtuoso at the top of his game,” Jimmy Dimarino, a first-year general surgery resident—and on some days an aspiring neurosurgeon himself—often enthused to Callie.
Jimmy tried to attend as many of Dr. Weldon’s operations as he could, badgering Callie for scheduling information. As the chief scrub nurse on Trey Weldon’s handpicked OR team for the past twelve months, Callie knew what procedure was slated and when; she was also privy to the emergency schedule.
She shared the inside scoop with Jimmy because they went way back, to the bad old days of elementary school when they’d lived next door to each other. Somehow their relationship had survived a brief eighth-grade romance, too. These days, Jimmy’s long-term fondness for Callie had been elevated to outright admiration—due in large part to her access to Dr. Trey Weldon.
“The AVM has been repaired,” Trey announced. “We were able to avoid any undue disturbance of the surrounding brain tissue, so the patient’s recovery ought to be swift and unremarkable.”
He made it sound like a decree that would naturally be obeyed. Callie smiled behind her surgical mask, then lifted her eyes to see Trey looking directly at her.
For one seemingly endless moment, time stood still as their gazes met and held.
And then: “Fritche, close,” Trey ordered with a nod toward one of the residents. He moved away from the table amidst murmurs of praise and appreciation, even a smattering of applause.
Scott Fritche, a first-year neurosurgical resident, stepped up to close, a task often given to underlings to further their experience.
Callie stayed where she was, assisting Scott Fritche, handing him the necessary instruments, sponges and sutures, subtly guiding him, before he needed to ask for anything.
She’d worked with Fritche a few times before, during his general-surgery residency, preceding this one, before she had become a permanent member of Trey’s team. But she didn’t remember Fritche being quite as ham-handed as he was today.
“I swear it took Fritche longer to close than for Trey to perform the entire operation,” complained Quiana Turner, as she and Callie trooped out of the OR, tugging off their masks.
Callie smiled at Quiana’s exaggeration. “We’ve gotten spoiled, working with Trey,” she conceded. “He’s a tough act for anybody to follow, let alone a resident.”
“Fritche sure isn’t the hotshot he thinks he is,” Leo Arkis said, sneering.
Leo did the advance OR work for the Weldon team and also served as backup relief to Callie or Quiana when necessary. “Could that clod have done any worse in there, messing up sutures and dropping sponges like a flower girl tossing rose petals at a wedding?”
“That’s kind of harsh, Leo. Fritche wasn’t all that bad,” chided Callie. “He’s inexperienced and he was nervous but—”
“I wish we’d called Trey back in to watch that jerk at work,” Leo cut in. “It would’ve been a kick seeing the icy wrath of our boss freeze Fritche into a human Popsicle.”
Callie arched her dark brows. “Leo, I know how you feel about Fritche, but ratting on him to Trey is—”
She broke off in midsentence because Dr. Trey Weldon stood in the middle of the newly renovated lounge, which the trio had just entered.
He was pulling his scrub shirt over his head.
The sight of him stopped Callie in her tracks, rendering her speechless. Trey tossed the shirt aside and stood bare-chested, the strong, well-defined muscles of his chest and shoulders revealed in the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights. His green scrub pants rode low on his waist, displaying the flat belly, a deep-set navel and a sprinkling of dark, wiry hair arrowing downward.
In the year
