Harrington,” she said quietly, knowing he couldn’t yet focus but that he could hear her well enough. “Chase,” she expanded, offering him the comfort of hearing his name, “you came through surgery just fine. You’re in recovery. You’ll be here for a while before they take you to a room. Everything went really well.” She knew many patients emerged from anesthesia unaware that the procedure was already over. Some returned to consciousness worrying about the outcome. Either way, she never hesitated to relieve whatever anxiety she could as soon as possible. “Are you with me?”
His eyes blinked open, but she’d barely caught a glimpse of breathtaking blue before they drifted closed again.
“What time is it?”
His voice was deep, a low, smoky rasp made thick by drugs and raw from the airway that had been in his throat.
“After eleven.”
Once more he opened his eyes. Once more they drifted closed.
“Morning or night?”
“Night. You’ve just come from surgery,” she repeated, thinking he was trying to orient himself. “You were brought up here from Emergency. Do you remember what happened?”
His brow furrowed. “I was in an accident,” he murmured, trying to lift his broad hand to his forehead. An IV was taped into place in a vein above his wrist. From beneath the open edge of his blue-dotted hospital gown, EKG leads trailed over the corded muscles of his wide shoulders. “I need a…phone.”
Too drugged to master the effort, his hand fell. “I missed a meeting. It was…where was it?” he asked, sounding as if he were trying to remember where he was supposed to have been. “Why can’t I think?”
“Because the anesthetic is still in your system,” she told him, rather surprised he sounded as coherent as he did. It took a while for such heavy anesthesia to loosen its grip. Normally, all a patient wanted to do was sleep. Yet, he refused to give up and let the drugs carry him off again. “That’s perfectly normal. Just forget about the phone for now.”
“Can’t. It was important,” he stressed thickly.
“Nothing’s as important right now for you as rest.”
His hand lifted once more, this time to stop her. “Don’t go. Please.” The word came out as little more than a whisper. “Don’t.”
The metal siderails were up on the gurney. Catching his arm to keep him from pulling on a lead or bumping the IV, she lowered it to his side.
His hand caught hers. “I need to let them know.”
“Let them know what?” she asked, as surprised by the strength in his grip as by the urgency behind his rasped words. Given the sedation he’d had, that urgency totally confused her. It was the same sort of frantic undertone she’d encountered when accident victims came out of surgery worried about someone who’d been in the accident with them, an overwhelming need that reached beyond any immediate concern for themselves.
But he’d been alone. And he was talking about a meeting.
“They need to know I didn’t…stand them up.”
The soft click and beep of monitors melded with the quiet shuffle of the nurse moving around Alex as she stood with her hand in his, studying the compelling lines of his face. She couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of deal he had going that was so important to him that he’d fight through the fog of drugs to keep from jeopardizing it. It was none of her business anyway.
He was her business though. And she definitely recognized signs of an iron will when she saw one. Right now, that will was definitely working against him.
Shelving an odd hint of dread at the thought of encountering that will when he was conscious, she curved her free hand over his shoulder. She wanted him calm. Better yet, she wanted him sleeping. “What time was your meeting?”
Over the blip of the heart monitor, he whispered, “Seven-thirty.”
“As late as it is, I’m sure your party has already figured out that you’re not showing up tonight. You can talk to your secretary in the morning and straighten out everything.” Practicality joined assurance. “You wouldn’t be able to carry on a phone conversation anyway. Your voice is barely audible.”
His brow furrowed at that.
“Try to let go of it for now,” she urged. “Get some rest.”
The muscles beneath her hand felt as hard as stone, but she could feel him relaxing beneath her touch. He said nothing else as she stood there watching the furrows ease from his brow and listening to his breathing grow slow and even.
Letting her hand slip from his, Alex stepped back, her glance cutting to the nurse hanging a fresh bag of saline for his IV. She didn’t believe for a moment that he’d accepted her logic or her suggestion. The painkiller he’d been given had just kicked in. With the sedatives still in his system, he couldn’t have stayed awake no matter how hard he’d tried.
She glanced at the institutional black-and-white clock high on the wall.
Her day had started nearly twenty hours ago and she was tired. Not exhausted the way she’d so often been during her residency. “Exhausted” came after forty hours with no sleep. But those days of honing her skills in the competitive battlefield of a teaching hospital were over. She had a normal life now. As normal as any practicing surgeon and single mom had, anyway. This kind of tired was a piece of cake.
“I don’t imagine any of his family is here yet. Did they want me to call?”
“His family wasn’t notified,” the soft-spoken nurse replied. “His chart says the only person he wanted contacted was his lawyer.”
“His lawyer?”
The nurse shrugged. “That’s what he told them in Emergency. Some guy in Seattle. The only other thing he wanted was to make a phone call about a meeting. The one he was talking about just now, I guess. They told him they’d call anyone he wanted for him, but he apparently insisted that he had to make the call himself.
“He was in no shape to use a phone,” she continued, checking the monitors and noting the readings. “From the notes in his chart, the paramedics already had him full of morphine and all anyone downstairs cared about was getting his bleeding under control and getting him into CT and surgery.”
Alex slipped off her cap, threading her fingers through her short dark hair as she cast one last glance at the still and sedated man on the gurney. Even with the morphine, if he’d been conscious, he’d been in pain. Even then, in pain and bleeding, that meeting had haunted him.
Unless he was negotiating world peace or working on a deal to cure some disease, she still had no idea what would have been that important to him. But Honeygrove was hardly the Hague, there were no big medical research facilities that she knew of in town, and she was shooting in the dark. Her concerns tended to remain very close to home. It was people she cared about. Her family. Her friends. Her patients. There was no way to know what really mattered to a man like Chase Harrington.
She couldn’t relate at all to him. Yet, as Alex told the nurse to call her at home if there was any change and headed for the locker room, she actually felt bad
