was cutting his way through the packed crowds, head and shoulders above other people. Coming to her. Oh, wow!
Her mind stuttered to a standstill as his purposeful stride eliminated the gap between them, then kicked off again, in a jumble.
He was going to talk to her. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, yes! But what would he say? What would she say? She must look hideous. Her hair was a worse-than-usual mess. Not even lip gloss. She must still be puffed up with that horrible deathlike sleep on board the plane—not that those lethal eyes said anything, but—
A bloodcurdling shriek went through her like a scythe.
Cassandra jerked around, but not before she saw his eyes snapping from consuming to concerned as they refocused behind her, searching out the source of distress.
The shrieks continued, rising to a manic pitch. People were running, some away from the source of disturbance. That added to her confusion until she remembered where they were. In an airport screams might easily be interpreted as some sort of danger. Her first impulse was to rush to help. It must be all her medical training, and probably her knight-to-the-rescue genes as well.
Shouts in many languages echoed. She made out enough to know there’d been an accident. Someone—a child—was injured, unconscious.
She was running by now, towards the milling crowd. He was ahead of her, his growls cutting a clear path to the victim in seconds.
It wasn’t as easy for her. The crowd closed up again in his wake, didn’t part for her as it had for him. She had to shove and elbow away layer after layer of onlookers, trying to get to the object of their horrified fascination.
Her shouts of, “Let me pass. I’m a doctor,” didn’t make any impression on the predominantly Spanish audience. Then she heard his voice again, snapping something in Spanish, and suddenly she had a front-row view of the emergency.
A hysterical woman being restrained, dragged away. A motionless boy on the floor, or at least a head of golden hair. The rest of him was obscured by the man’s huge crouching body. He was already administering CPR.
She groaned. So the boy had arrested. If the man could judge that. And he’d volunteered to resuscitate him—probably on the strength of a technique picked up from some medical TV drama.
Falling to her knees beside him, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Señor? I can take over while you make sure an ambulance is on its way. I’m a doctor.”
He withdrew to deliver cardiac compressions, didn’t even look at her. “I got that already.”
She started. His voice—a bass rasp that was just as potent as the rest of him. Concise, cultured. And American. American?
Later. Focus! “Great, so if you’ll just...” Her eyes fell on the boy’s face before the man swooped to deliver another breath and the words stopped in her throat. The boy’s mouth—it was burned!
Fighting off the wave of horror that years of handling the worst medicine had to offer hadn’t eradicated, Cassandra’s eyes darted around, summing up the situation. A boy of less than three. A pretty plastic tree a few feet away with dangling electric toy planets. They’d been glowing minutes ago. Not any more.
The boy must have bitten the electric cord to pluck one off.
Her stomach heaved again. The center of the burn encompassed both lips in a two-inch, grayish-white, depressed area: the current’s point of entry. Electrical burns were far worse than thermal ones as the current arcing through the tissues damaged everything along their path down to the bone. This one, when it healed, would look awful and result in horrible complications, from mouth contraction to tongue adhesions to bone involvement, causing everything from disfigurement to drooling to speech impairment.
But she was way ahead of herself here. No point worrying about those burns now. Keeping the boy’s circulation going and oxygen reaching his brain was the number-one priority. She’d better take over and make sure the kid got the best chance. This guy might have taken a course in resuscitation, but young children needed a totally different resuscitation protocol than adults. What would be perfect technique for an adult, or even an older child, would crush the boy’s chest with the hard, two-handed compressions, or burst his lungs with the forced ventilation. Even if he knew enough not to be too forceful, he would probably not know that the 80 compressions and the 16 breaths per minute of the usual CPR would be too few to make any difference.
“Sir...” The man withdrew from a breath and she noticed his technique for the first time. It shut her up again.
One large hand pressed down with rapid, shallow compressions. She counted them—at this rate, they’d be an optimum 120 per minute. The other hand had two fingers locating the right position on the sternum, just below the nipple line. The five-to-one ratio of compressions to breaths resulted in 25 breaths per minute, delivered with just the right force. Everything done to the letter of advanced life support protocols for a child that age.
No—not TV-trained after all. This man knew what he was doing. And then some.
Feeling redundant all of a sudden, she fell back on her heels, taking stock, her heart itching at the idea that the man was adding further injury to the mutilated tissues every time he delivered a breath into the boy’s inert lungs. Not that that could be helped.
The mother’s wailing filtered through to her from a distance. What she must be feeling—the sheer horror and despair! But, then, she hadn’t been watching her little one closely enough and she... Cassandra’s censorious thoughts stumbled, hot shame squashing them.
Look who’s being holier than thou, she thought. Safeguarding kids every minute of the day was one of life’s impossibilities. She could vouch for that. What about the right-on-his-head dive Aaron had taken out of his crib, in front of both Amanda and herself? Luckily, he had been OK. No thanks to them.
Her focus returned to the crisis. So the man was delivering first-rate CPR. Working with the presumption it would prove effective, she should assess the boy’s other injuries—other burns, any limb angulations. The generalized muscular contraction the jolt must have caused could have been violent enough to fracture bones.
The next second, coughing brought her out of her absorbed examination. The man’s coughing.
Still coughing yet not missing a beat, he looked up and she again felt as the boy must have felt the moment that devastating current had arced through his body.
“You a real doctor?” he panted.
Her mind was shut down, but her smart mouth must have been on auto. “No, I’m just a surgeon.”
He came up from the next breath with the banked fire in his eyes flaring, promising sensual retribution. Later, they said. Now he only rasped, “OK, Dr Surgeon—take over respiration.”
She swooped down for the next breath, cringing at having to bear down on the boy’s burnt lips but forcing herself to form a tight seal over his mouth. The man immediately set up a perfect rhythm of compressions with her, then went into another coughing fit.
“Good thing you’re here,” he gasped once he’d brought himself under control. “No reason to inoculate the kid with more of my resistant strains.”
OK, not just a highly
