you think, buddy.
Standing too, Zac checked his watch. “I should get back to the rig. Help Susan check inventory.”
“I’ll walk with you.” Lance followed him out of the cafeteria. “Break’s over.”
They rode the elevator to the first floor and headed down the hall toward the ER.
“No man is an island, remember?” Lance said, apparently not about to let the matter drop.
“Maybe I am.”
Zac knew he sounded defensive—but, damn. Soon Lance and Priya and everyone else at that stupid conference would be all up in his business, so sue him if he wanted to fly below the radar just a little bit longer.
“Islands suit me. Some tropical place with fruity drinks and beaches for miles. I like that kind of island.”
They rounded the corner into the controlled chaos of the emergency room, where people were rushing around and the air was filled with the sound of babies crying and clacking gurneys. The scent of antiseptic and lemon floor wax mingled around him like a comforting blanket.
Across the way, Zac spotted Carmen talking to Wendy Smith at the nurses’ station and stopped short.
Lance glanced between Zac and Carmen and then clapped him on the shoulder and chuckled. “Sounds a whole lot like Trinidad to me, dude.”
Zac barely noticed his friend walk away, his attention focused on the gorgeous midwife with the warm green-gold eyes and even warmer heart. He’d agreed to help Carmen and he would. He’d go to her conference and play her besotted fiancé and keep his promise—because that was what he did. He wasn’t his father. He was trustworthy, moral, strong. He’d play her perfect date, wine and dine her to within an inch of her life, fool her potential bosses, and help her get the job.
He’d keep his emotions and his past out of it.
And maybe, if he told himself that enough times, he’d start to believe it.
“UNITS RESPOND TO motor vehicle accident on Arctic Boulevard at West Fifty-Eighth Avenue. Thirty-seven-year-old female, eight months pregnant, complaining of chest pain. Over.”
“Copy. FA14 responding,” Zac said from behind the wheel. “Two minutes out.”
He steered through the congested midday traffic toward the accident scene with lights blazing and sirens blaring, glad for something else to focus on besides Carmen. His weekend with her was only two days away now, and the closer the conference got the more worried he was that he’d made a horrible mistake.
What the hell had he been thinking, saying he’d pretend to be her fiancé in the last place in the world he ever wanted to set foot in again?
Besides the looming threat of being in his father’s world again, there was also the fact that the connection between him and Carmen had never gone away after their one night together. It wasn’t even a conscious thing, really—more an underlying thread of awareness that pulled a bit tighter each time he was around her. In truth, it was why he hadn’t dated anyone since they’d slept together. Much as he hated to admit it, since their fling he hadn’t wanted anyone but her.
Which scared him more than just about anything else.
Because if he did get serious with her, what was to say it wouldn’t end in betrayal, just like his father had betrayed his mother? Sure, his mother had found a way to forgive his father and work things out between them, but Zac couldn’t expect the same from Carmen if he screwed up. Or when he screwed up, since the odds weren’t in his favor given his genetics.
“What’s got your drawers in a twist?” said Susan, his EMT partner, from the back of the rig as she readied their medical packs for the scene. “You’ve got that look again.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror, scowling. “What look?”
“That brooding, pained one.” Susan snorted. “Either that or you’re constipated.”
“Funny. Not.”
Zac sighed and shook his head, pulling in behind one of four squad cars at the accident scene and jamming the transmission into park. He was unbuckling his seat belt as he opened the door.
“I’m fine. Why are you so nosy?”
“Not any of my business,” Susan said, climbing out at the back and handing him his pack. “Just figured you’d be a lot more cheerful since you have the whole upcoming weekend off. Lord knows I would be. I’d love to have three whole days to get away somewhere.”
They weaved through the crowd of onlookers and cops to where three vehicles were crunched together and blocking two lanes—a flatbed truck in front, followed by a compact car, and finally a four-door sedan. Pretty clear from the damage and the placement that it had been a rear-end accident.
“Going anywhere special?” Susan asked him as they stopped near the middle car.
Yes.
“No.” Zac dropped his pack on the ground near his feet and spoke to the cop in front of him. “EMT Zac Taylor. We got a call on a pregnant woman with chest pain?”
“Over here,” the cop said, leading them around the vehicles to where two women stood near the curb, one perhaps around sixty, the other holding her very pregnant belly as she leaned against a lamppost. “That’s her.”
“I got it,” Susan said, walking over to the pregnant woman.
Zac approached the older woman, who looked pale as death and was visibly shaking. “Were you involved in the accident, ma’am?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“This car?” He pointed to the middle car.
The woman raised a shaky hand toward the last vehicle. “That one.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No...”
Her voice was barely more than a whisper and her trembling worsened as shock set in. She cradled her left hand and Zac noticed blood on one of her fingers, oozing from a fairly deep laceration.
The woman swayed slightly, and Zac grasped her arm to steady her. “Ma’am, how about I take you inside the ambulance and we see about getting your finger bandaged up? You can rest there a moment, okay?”
“She’s pregnant...” the woman said, her voice dazed as he guided her toward the ambulance. “I want to make sure the baby’s okay. I was driving behind her and she slammed on her brakes. I didn’t realize I was so close and I went right into her.”
Susan was already at the rig, getting the pregnant woman loaded onto a gurney. As he helped the older woman up the stairs into the back Zac caught snippets of what the woman was telling his partner.
“I
