of her chin that denied the previous few seconds of byplay, and received a cool nod in reply. ‘Well, there’s been an accident,’ she announced, the words beginning to sound more fluent the more often she used them. ‘The child fell and hit his head. He’s still unconscious.’ She gestured towards her charge, affording him his first view of their patient.
He gasped and she found herself unceremoniously nudged aside as he strode to the side of the bed.
‘Mio figlio!’ he exclaimed in a voice full of horror as he began to examine the child, and they were almost the only words she understood in the following flood of words. All she could tell was that they were questions and that he was very angry.
‘I’m sorry, but when you speak so fast I can’t understand,’ she announced, reverting to English and stopping him in his tracks. ‘Did you say he’s your son?’
‘Si…Yes,’ he corrected himself impatiently, his dark brows pulled together in a deep V as he checked the unconscious child’s pupillary reaction. ‘Taddeo Aldarini. He’s almost five years old…But what happened to him? Where is Maddelena, and what are you doing with my son?’
He’d straightened up by then and his final question was almost an accusation, not softened at all by the sexy accent shaping his words.
Lissa chose to answer the more important one first.
‘He fell at the beach and landed on his back on the rocks.’ She held up her hand when he went to interrupt. ‘He’s been unconscious since he fell but his vital signs are all within normal bounds. I didn’t let anyone move him until I could stabilise his spine on an improvised backboard. As far as I can see, his only external injury is a bump on the back of his head where the skin has been broken.’
‘You are a nurse?’ he questioned as he swiftly jotted down what she’d told him on the case notes.
‘A doctor,’ she corrected as an amplified voice cut through the hubbub outside the curtain. The electronic distortion meant that she understood little more than the fact that the man was being paged in a hurry.
‘What sort of a doctor?’ he demanded with a suspicious look.
‘Accident and emergency for the last year but I’ve been thinking about going into general practice.’ At least, she had been before her private life had collapsed in ruins around her.
‘You can prove this?’ he challenged with a harried look over his shoulder as the disembodied voice called his name again.
‘Now? No,’ she said, startled by the demand. Was he going to sue her for practising medicine without permission in a foreign country? But Italy was part of the European Union. Didn’t that mean that people were free to work in any of the member states?
The thoughts scrambling around in her head screeched to a halt with the memory of her little bag of belongings.
‘Just a minute.’ She crouched down to tip everything out onto the floor and grabbed the flat leather wallet hidden right at the bottom. ‘Is this what you want to see?’
She held out both her passport and her hospital identity card. She had no idea how she’d come to pack it when she’d had no intention of doing anything other than vegetate for the next four weeks, but when she’d been preparing for her day on the beach had found it with the rest of her documents.
He examined both of them in silence then gave a decisive nod.
‘I would like to ask a favour of you,’ he said, his choice of words strangely formal. ‘Would you accompany Taddeo to the…radiografia? As you see, I already have so many people waiting and now there are the victims of…scontrarsi.’ He mimed a collision and gestured towards the throng all too audible on the other side of the curtain, but his glance towards his son was very telling. He was obviously torn between his duty to his patients and his personal wish to be beside his son.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her problem but, having become involved in the situation, how could she not see it through?
‘I’ll stay with him on one condition—that you find me something a little more…’ She gestured towards her skimpy attire with a grimace. It had seemed fairly modest on the beach, but next to his fully clothed body, there was something almost…intimate about the contrast.
‘It would be a shame to hide such beauty,’ he said in a low voice and she glimpsed a sudden unnerving flash of heat in his dark eyes. ‘But perhaps it would be safer.’
An hour later, Lissa’s pulse still tended to miss a beat when she thought about the startling potency of that glance. The only way she’d been able keep it under some sort of control was to concentrate on her little charge.
It had been a major undertaking to dredge up enough Italian to make herself understood, especially as those long conversations with her grandmother had never covered such topics as ‘make sure you leave the towels in position around his head until you’ve taken the X-ray of his neck’.
Along the way, she found several members of staff who spoke good English—better than her Italian, at any rate—and was able to ask some tactful questions. By the time she’d collected the evidence that Taddeo had suffered no broken or cracked bones, she’d also started to build up a picture of why the accident and emergency department was in such chaos.
‘Dr Aldarini, would you like to set your mind at rest?’ she invited when she finally managed to track him down with the developed X-ray plates.
He pounced on them so eagerly that Lissa was glad that she’d thought to bring them down to him. It was obvious that he’d been worrying about his son in spite of the fact that he was still rushed off his feet.
While he scrutinised each plate minutely, she did the same to him, wondering just what it was about this man, rumpled and exhausted as he was, that set up this strange electric tingle inside her. She couldn’t remember having had anything quite like it happen to her before and it was totally inappropriate. Not only was she in Italy for rest and recuperation in the wake of the disaster of the last few months, but this man was obviously a pillar of the local community. He was probably a very loving husband to the pretty young wife she’d had to leave behind at the beach and he was definitely a concerned parent.
She made herself drag her eyes away from him to gauge how many patients there were still waiting for attention.
None seemed to be victims of the outbreak of food-poisoning she’d heard about. Apparently, there had been some sort of welcoming buffet at one of the larger hotels a little way along the coast, resulting in nearly fifty people suffering the effects of the flouting of hygiene regulations in the kitchen.
‘Where is Taddeo now?’ Dr Aldarini demanded when he finished scrutinising the plates, and she turned to face him again. ‘Is he on his way back down here?’
‘I hope you don’t think I was throwing my weight around, but…he came round while the X-rays were being taken and the radiographer and I decided he would probably be better off under supervision in the children’s ward. Apparently the paediatrician already knows him there?’
His mouth twisted into a wry grin. ‘Unfortunately, too well,’ he agreed. ‘The last time he was here was several months ago when he came off his bicicletta and broke his arm.’ He shook his head. ‘He has no fear, that one. He will give me white hair.’
Her eyes
