over the clean site, and he counted slowly. By the time he got to four, blood bubbled up again, filling the space. ‘Damn it.’ He packed in more gauze.
‘Pressure’s still dropping.’ A fray in Abbie’s calm unravelled in her voice. ‘She’s lost three litres of blood and this is our last packed cell until the helicopter arrives.’
‘It will be OK.’ He said it as much for himself as to reassure Abbie and Erin. Closing out the sound of the beeping machines, he carefully examined the entire operation site millimetre by millimetre, looking for the culprit.
‘O2 sats are dropping.’ Stark urgency rang in Abbie’s voice.
The gurgling sound of the suction roared around him as Jenny’s life-force squirted into the large bottle under the operating table almost as fast as Abbie could pump it in. A flash of memory suddenly exploded in his head. Him. Raised voices. Christina’s screams. Dom. Life ebbing away.
His heart raced and he dragged in a steadying breath. He hadn’t known how to save Dom and he’d failed Christina but he was saving this woman.
Look harder. He caught a glimpse of something and immediately fritzed it with the diathermy. Still the blood gurgled back at him. He held out his hand. ‘Four-zero.’
‘She’s about one minute away from arresting.’Abbie hung up the last unit of blood, her forehead creased in anxiety.
‘I’m on it.’ Sending all his concentration down his fingers, he carefully looped the silk around the bleeding vessel and made a tie. Then he counted.
This time the site stayed miraculously clear. His chest relaxed, releasing the breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding.
‘Pressure’s rising, O2 sats are rising.’ Relief poured through Abbie’s voice as she raised her no-nonsense gaze to his. ‘You had me worried.’
Despite her words, he caught a fleeting glimpse of approbation in the shimmering depths of green. ‘Hey, I’m Italian—we always go for the big dramatic finish.’
Abbie blinked, her long brown lashes touching the top of her mask, and then she laughed. A full-bodied, joyous laugh that rippled through her, lighting up her eyes, dancing across her forehead and jostling the stray curl that had sneaked out from under her unflattering theatre cap.
And you thought she was plain? He frowned at the unwelcome question as he started to close the muscle layers.
Abbie administered pethidine for pain relief through a pump. ‘Well, we Anglo-Saxons prefer the quiet life.’
‘Speak for yourself. I’m not averse to a bit of drama and flair. It makes life interesting.’ Erin fluttered her pretty lashes at him over her surgical mask, an open sign of if you’re interested, then I’m definitely in.
The day his divorce had been finalised fifteen years ago, he’d committed to dating beautiful women and dating often—a strategy that served him well. He loved women and enjoyed their company—he just didn’t want to commit to one woman. The emotional fallout of his marriage had put paid to that. Now he focused on work, saving lives and enjoying himself. It was a good plan because it left him very little time to think about anything else.
Usually when he was given such an open invitation as the attractive Erin had just bestowed, he smiled, called her cara mia, took her out to dinner and then spent a fun few weeks before the next pretty nurse caught his eye or he caught the glimpse of marriage and babies in her eyes.
But recently that game had got tired.
The theatre phone rang and Abbie took the call. ‘Leo, Justin wants an opinion on the crushed leg so a decision can be made to either evacuate or operate first.’
‘Tell him I’m five minutes away.’
When Abbie finished the call he continued. ‘Whether I should operate or not might be semantics. Evacuation might be the only option due to staffing issues.’
Her shoulders squared, pulling her baggy scrubs across her chest and she rose on her toes. ‘If the patient requires surgery before evacuation then Bandarra Base will make it possible. You worry about the surgery and let me worry about the staffing issue; that’s my job.’
Her professionalism eddied around him—her sound medical judgement, the composed and ordered way she’d run the entire emergency and the undeniable fact she’d stayed calm and focused even when she’d been pushed way out of her comfort zone by the emergency anaesthetic.
The fact she put her patient’s needs first and asked you for help, despite how you treated her.
A streak of shame assailed him. Abbie McFarlane was a damn good doctor. How the hell had he missed that last night?
Abbie’s legs ached with heaviness as she sank onto the saggy couch in the staff lounge. She slipped off her shoes and swung her legs upwards, breaking the rule of no feet on the coffee table. Today had been one hell of a day but, despite her fatigue, a glow of pride warmed her. Bandarra Base had coped with a full-on emergency and, although two of their patients were in a critical and serious condition, the fact they were still alive lay at the feet of her team.
And Leo Costa. The opinionated, charismatic and brilliant surgeon.
Last night she’d wanted to hate him, this morning she’d just wanted him to go as far away from her as possible but obviously that was far too simple a request. If the fates knew in advance she would need a surgeon today, why couldn’t they have sent along a ‘nice guy’, a competent surgeon or, better yet, a female surgeon?
But no, they were enjoying a joke at her expense and had dispatched her worst nightmare. A man with magnetic allure, the kind of man she’d learned was toxic to her. A couple of short relationships at uni had made her consider perhaps she lacked judgement in her choice of men but it had been Greg who’d really rammed home the message. With charm and good looks, he’d drawn her into his enticing web and then trapped her. Now she knew to her very core that letting a man in her life was like taking a razor blade to her wrist—an act of self-harm.
So why, knowing all of that, did it only take one look from those dark, dark eyes to set off a rampaging trail of undeniable lust inside her, sending her pulse racing and battering every single one of Greg’s painful lessons about charismatic men? Battering her belief that the only way to be safe was to live a single life. A belief she hadn’t questioned once in three years.
She bit her lip hard against the delicious sensations and loathed her own weakness. But, despite how she felt about her reaction to him, she couldn’t deny Leo was the prize piece in today’s emergency. Without him, Jenny and the elderly woman would have been immediately airlifted to Melbourne and there would have been a strong chance both of them could have died in transit. Leo had saved Jenny and given Mavis a fighting chance.
Fatigue pummelled her sitting body and Abbie fought hard to resist closing her eyes. She’d already sent Justin home and she only had to stay awake a little bit longer, do one more round and then, fingers crossed, she could go home too. The squeak of the lounge door interrupted her thoughts and, immediately on alert that a patient had deteriorated, she glanced up, expecting to see the night-nurse.
It wasn’t the night-nurse. An intoxicating shimmer raced through her from the tip of her toes to the top of her scalp, leaving her breathless.
