Christy McKellen - Mills & Boon Showcase

It was after hours, which meant that only a few of the operating theatres were still running. She walked the hall, looking for activity and lights. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Tate staring through the small rectangular window of an operating-room door.

He didn’t notice her. He just stared, transfixed, through the window.

“Tate,” she said quietly, as she placed a hand on his shoulder.

He didn’t turn to look at her, keeping his eyes glued on the window. “I think she’s stabilizing. They kicked me out of the room, so I can’t tell for sure. But they have stopped calling for blood and I can see the anesthesia monitors and her heart rate has come down to the one-twenties and her blood pressure is back up.”

“What happened?” Kate asked, desperately wanting to see for herself.

“I don’t know, they won’t tell me anything. The usual patient confidentiality, etc. I only got here about fifteen minutes ago. I was checking the operating-room board to see how many cases were lined up for tonight at the front desk when the porter from the blood bank came to drop off blood. I overheard him verifying Chloe’s name and blood-bank number with the unit clerk.”

“Who is in with her?”

“Gynecology,” he said, his resentment coming through clearly.

“Oh.” Kate felt some understanding drift in. The department of obstetrics and gynecology was a separate surgical department from the department of general surgery. While both groups worked in the same operating rooms, the two disciplines kept to themselves with little understanding of the ins and outs of each other’s fields.

“Is it a hemorrhagic ovarian cyst?” Kate asked, still needing answers.

“I don’t know, Kate. Like I said, they won’t tell me anything.” She stopped asking questions.

It was right that they were guarding Chloe’s privacy, but at the same time it was intensely aggravating. Being in the health care field, she had become used to having access to people’s confidential information. Only this time she and Tate were not responsible for Chloe’s care, so they had no need to have access to that information other than for their personal interest, which did not entitle them to it.

She and Tate stood there for another twenty minutes before Kate had had enough. Let them throw her out, let them reprimand her even for her inappropriate behavior. She was already being sued. This, at least, would be worth the consequences.

Without words, she gently pushed Tate to the side and went through the operating-room door. She wasn’t ready for what she saw, despite it being an everyday scene. It felt completely different when the person on the operating table was someone you loved. Chloe was lying there, surrounded by the surgical team. There were two anesthetists at the head of the table, two scrub nurses, and what looked like three people from the gynecology team. She looked at the faces and recognized Erin Madden, the chief gynecology resident, whom she had met on several occasions over their years in training.

“Hi, Kate.” Erin acknowledged her presence, though her eyes didn’t deviate from Chloe’s abdomen, which was open on the operating room table.

Part of Kate wanted to get closer, but she wasn’t sure she was ready emotionally to see Chloe so exposed. She also didn’t want to push her luck and risk getting thrown out, as Tate had.

“She’s going to be okay. We have evacuated the hemoperitoneum and have stopped the bleeding. We are going to be closing in the next few minutes and then she will be going to Recovery, followed by a short stay in the intensive care unit in case she runs into any massive transfusion complications.”

“Uh-huh.” Kate nodded, trying to process the information she was being given.

“I’m sorry we had to open her, Kate. We tried with the laprascope but she had too much blood in her abdomen and was too unstable to tolerate it.”

“But the bleeding has been stopped?” Kate asked, unable to keep herself from surveying the room, her eyes focused on the evidence of what looked like a massive blood loss.

“Yes.”

“What happened?” Kate finally asked.

“That’s not for me to disclose to you, Kate. Chloe will be able to tell you herself later, if she chooses to. I think you should go now and take Dr. Reed with you. She is stable and we’ll take good care of her. You can see her in the intensive care unit in a couple of hours, once she’s settled in.”

“Okay,” Kate said, resigned, knowing she would get no more from Erin. “Thank you,” she said to the team that had obviously saved Chloe’s life.

She left the room, gently pushing on the door to make sure it didn’t hit Tate. He hadn’t moved.

“She’s okay. They won’t tell me what happened, but they opened her, stopped whatever was bleeding, and she’s stabilized. She’s going to go to the intensive care unit for a short while because of the large amount of blood products she received.”

“Thank you, Kate,” Tate replied. His eyes were still trained on the window and he didn’t budge from his spot outside the door.

“Tate, they have asked us to leave the operating room and I think we should. She’s stable and there is nothing we can do for her except get in the way and distract the team.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

“We’re not leaving her, Tate. We are helping her by getting out of the way and letting them do their jobs. The same thing we ask other people to do for us.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him a little to ease him away from his spot.

“Tate, we need to go. You know Chloe would never want us to see her like this.” It was true, but she still felt mean, using guilt to move Tate away.

“Are you in love with Matt McKayne?” he asked, with no reproach or anger left in his voice.

She was shocked both by the abrupt change in the conversation and the directness of the question itself. So much so that she answered without thinking about her response. “Yes, I think I always have been, even when I hated him.”

“Then you should be with him. Forget everything that has gone wrong between you and be together.”

“It’s not that simple, Tate. I can’t trust him.”

“Kate, that’s not simple,” he replied, pointing towards the door. Then he took one last look through the window and walked away from both Chloe and Kate.

AFTER DROPPING KATE off at the emergency entrance doors, Matt waited. The admitting office had informed him that Dr. Darcy would be going to the intensive care unit and Matt found his way to the unit’s family waiting room and waited. In the three hours he waited for Kate he replayed all the scenes of the past, including the one tonight.

She had known it was him. For the first time there was not a single doubt in his mind about whom Kate wanted. She had used his name and kept her eyes open as they had made love and it had been the most powerful sexual experience he had ever had. She really was the most perfect and beautiful woman he had ever met.

The hard waiting-room chair he sat on and the coffee-machine brew he sipped were a stark contrast to the earlier events of the evening. He cringed both at the coffee and at his unfair resentment and anger towards her pager and her job. It was irrational to feel resentful when Chloe Darcy was fighting for her life, but he still had the feeling. He had finally been getting through to Kate. Physically they were on the same page and he was angry that they were not going to have the rest of the night to work towards resolving the remaining distance between them. There was still some part of the picture he was missing, something that was holding Kate back from opening up to him completely.

Ever since he had returned he had assumed that something had been Tate. The pair’s past relationship, that first night together when they had almost made love and she had stopped suddenly, the night he’d seen them together at her apartment, and the obvious continued connection and trust between them had left him with little other explanation. But he had been wrong. He was certain now that they were not together romantically. Kate was Kate and she would never have made love with him if she was in love and involved with another man, he was certain of that. So what explanation did he have for her refusal to believe the truth and her violent reaction towards him and his long-ago reasoning?