CAROL MARINELLI: Washed Away

E-mail from: Mitch Kannon, fire chief,

Turning Point, Texas

To: Dan Egan, fire chief, Courage Bay, California

I had to weigh in with my conscience on this one, Dan, but I promised to let you know how things were going with the volunteers you sent down.

What’s got me concerned is that I’ve lost track of your emergency nurse, Cheryl Tierney. She’s a real professional, that one, and since she’d pretty much finished setting up the triage area in our temporary shelter, I sent her out on a call. Went to splint a little kid’s arm a few miles out of town.

Rain’s coming down like I’ve never seen it before, and visibility’s poor. The family she went to help said Cheryl left there a while ago and was headed for a shortcut back to town. Trouble is, the shortcut crossed over a bridge, and news is that the bridge washed out.

I’m not too worried. I figure Cheryl’s holed up somewhere safe to wait out the storm. I’m hoping she might have made it as far as Noah Arkin’s place. Noah’s our local vet, and if she’s with him, he and his menagerie will keep her safe. The power’s starting to go out in places and cell phone service is spotty, but as soon as I get word on Cheryl, I’ll let you know come hell or high water.

CAROL MARINELLI

was born in England and following her nursing training worked for a number of years in a phenomenally busy Accident and Emergency department. Taking a year off to backpack around Australia had rather more far reaching consequences than Carol had anticipated: marriage, three wonderful children and emigration (not in that order!).

Writing had always been a dream, though one she’d never quite followed through on. With her husband’s endless encouragement, gradually the story that had lived in her head for way too long found a new home on her computer and finally became her first book. Now she writes for Medical Romance and Presents and is thrilled to have been asked to write a book for the wonderful Code Red series!

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Writing can be lonely at times, so I was thrilled to work with so many wonderful authors on the Code Red series. It has been a real roller-coaster ride for me—getting to know not just my own hero and heroine, but my coauthors’, as well. On top of that, I loved corresponding with the other authors and working out all the little nuances of the interlinked characters that made them so real. In fact, by the time I’d finished the book, they were so real to me, I half expected to meet them walking down the street!

I was equally thrilled to finally have a valid excuse (if ever I needed one!) to travel from Australia, where I live, to America and finally witness firsthand all the wonderful images that I’d only seen from my television screen.

On the downside, I’ve now got permanently itchy feet and miss the buzz of working on a linked series.

Still, I’ve got the other fifteen books to add to my “to-be-read pile,” which can only mean a happy ending!

Happy reading,

Carol Marinelli

For Damian, Ronnie, Hagen,

Erin and Lara Burns.

With love and thanks.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“YOU KNOW WHAT this is called, don’t you, Cheryl?” Chief Mitch Kannon asked as he walked into the fire station headquarters, where a lonesome Cheryl Tierney was rather dispiritedly stocking a shelf with bandages in the makeshift triage area she was setting up—alone.

Cheryl and three other volunteers had flown in from Courage Bay, California, to Turning Point, Texas, to help receive the massive number of evacuees from the more northerly city of Corpus Christi, where a category four hurricane was due to hit.

All four of them had put their hands up without question when the request for assistance came in. All four of them had been keen to get there, ready for action the minute they arrived. They were emergency personnel after all. This was the type of drama they lived for!

And three of them were already out there in the thick of it. They’d been sent out on calls by Mitch, which left Cheryl to set up the area, alone and frustrated.

Cheryl gave a small shrug in response to Mitch’s question; she had no idea what he was going on about. Maybe another lecture was about to ensue. She’d barely set foot in Turning Point, a touch shaken after a turbulent flight but more than ready to get started, only to be told by the fire chief in no uncertain terms that the operating room scrubs and runners she was wearing weren’t “suitable” wet-weather gear. He’d promptly handed her a massive oversize pair of navy trousers and a cotton shirt that had seen better days, topped off with a huge pair of woolly socks and steel-toe boots—which she’d quickly changed into—then headed to the chief’s briefing. Mitch had instructed the gathered emergency teams as to their various roles and the types of damage and injuries they were to expect when the category four hurricane hit. She’d accepted his directions about the triage area for the expected casualties without question, and even smiled sweetly when Turning Point’s retired school nurse, Florence Templeton, who was eighty if she was a day, had chided her about the way she folded blankets. But if Mitch Kannon was about to offer advice on how to set up the equipment in her triage area, then he had better brace himself for a less-than-welcome response.

Cheryl was an experienced trauma nurse, exactly what Mitch Kannon had requested when he’d called on his old friend and colleague Fire Chief Dan Egan in Courage Bay and asked for a crack team to be sent. Advice about her clothes and her role in the disaster plan Cheryl would happily take, but if the fire chief was about to tell her how to stock the triage area, then it had better be with reasons he could back up. Trauma was Cheryl’s baby; emergency nursing was what she did best in this world, and she’d argue her side of things till she was blue in the face if that was what it took.

“I’ll tell you what they call this, Cheryl,” Mitch carried on easily, ignoring her rigid movements as she continued setting up. “This is what they call the lull before the storm.”

He laughed loudly at his lame joke, and for the first time since arriving in Turning Point, Cheryl found herself warming to the man.

Smiling even.

Since Dan Egan had called her, Cheryl had been running on pure adrenaline, but as the hours ticked by and everyone except her was out on a call, she was beginning to feel curiously deflated.

Nate Kellison, a paramedic with the Courage Bay fire department, had been sent to assist in the delivery of a baby. His colleague, Dana Ivie, a firefighter and Emergency Medical Technician was flying off to search for a group of Boy Scouts and their leader who’d been involved in a car accident. And ER resident Amy Sherwood, who’d been helping Cheryl, had set out with the sheriff, Jessie Boone, to assess the rescue center for evacuees that was located in the local high school.

Cheryl would love to be dealing with any one of those assignments, yet here she was, still setting up the triage area. The only other thing she’d done was give a couple of firefighters their tetanus boosters.