Scarlet Wilson - Locked Down With The Army Doc - Locked Down with the Army Doc / The Brooding Surgeon's Baby Bombshell

CHAPTER FOUR

HE WASN’T ENTIRELY sure what was going on. Maybe he’d been too forward with the woman who’d shared his bed last night. He’d wanted to envelop Amber in a hug, but her demeanor had told him not to, and he’d ended up just pulling her toward him and gently touching heads.

He still couldn’t work out what had possessed him. He hadn’t held a woman that close in...how long?

Two years. Two long, hard years.

One minute she was there. Next minute she was gone.

Jill Foster had been a bright-eyed medic he’d met in Afghanistan. She was one of the best he’d worked with. As a teenager she wanted to be a doctor but couldn’t afford to go to university, so she joined the army instead. Her skills and natural talent were picked up and she excelled in her role.

They worked side by side for six months. And as soon as he got home he missed her. By the time they redeployed again they were dating. Right up until the day he was felled by abdominal pain. The bothersome ache that had been distracting him had turned into an acute pain and he’d collapsed after finishing a long emergency surgery. Twelve hours later he’d woken up and life had changed.

Life had changed completely.

He’d had an appendectomy. It seemed that the army doc hadn’t recognized his own appendicitis. But in that twelve hours there had been an emergency—a group of soldiers had been caught in some cross fire and had needed to be retrieved. He was usually part of the emergency call-out team. But, when he’d been under anesthetic, Jill had taken his place. And it had cost her her life. While going to pick up their injured comrades the vehicle had driven over an IED, the effect instant.

Gone. Just like that.

He’d never forget the face of the base commander who’d been there to tell him as soon as he came around from anesthetic. The guy looked ill, his face pale underneath his tanned skin. The other soldiers had been retrieved, but Jill and three other members of the team Jack normally worked with had been wiped out.

The numbness spread through his body immediately. He pushed up from the gurney, ignoring any wound pain, and staggered across the compound toward the mortuary. Two squaddies saw him and ran over to help, throwing their arms around his waist to keep him steady.

But no one would let him see Jill.

And he knew why. He did. Surgeons knew better than anyone what the effects of an IED could be.

So, he sat on the floor of the mortuary for the next six hours and vowed to make his time in Afghanistan meaningful.

Everything after that became about the wound dressing.

Wartimes were tough. Surgeons dealt with explosive injuries that no normal surgeon would ever see. And because of his postings he’d grown familiar with the faces around the camp. The cheeky squaddie in the armory. The quiet Yorkshire lad who liked to read books. The gung-ho female sergeant who could give any guy a run for his money. All of them had ended up on his table.

Not all of them had lived. But Jack had done his best. He agonized over any person that he lost. Replayed everything in his mind, wondering what he could have done differently—could have done better.

Once he was in the desert setting, work was everything. He became almost obsessed. The research too was entirely in his focus. He quickly realized how good their dressing worked and what the life-saving implications were. It was everything to him.

It gave him something to focus on. It allowed him to build a shell around himself and close out the rest of the world. He still went above and beyond for his colleagues—he always would. But he’d lost the connection, he’d lost the emotion and empathy that he’d always had within the job.

He’d lost a little part of his heart.

And now? He had no idea what he was doing—in more ways than one. He wasn’t worried about helping after the hurricane. The infectious disease stuff was beyond his professional expertise. But if he had to hunt down people to deliver emergency antibiotics, he could live with that.

What he wasn’t so sure about was the fact that the first woman he’d held in two years had just blanked him and walked away. Was his heart so numb that he couldn’t pick up on female cues anymore?

Amber looked as if she was sucking in some deep breaths as she scrubbed her hands at one of the sinks. The noise seemed to echo around them in the basement. He couldn’t stand it. Should he apologize for holding her?

He shook his head and stalked across the corridor to the other room. The IV antibiotics were feeding slowly through to both Zane and Aaron. Both of them were still sedated and ventilated. He glanced at the monitors and then at their charts. The nurse came over and stood with him at the end of Zane’s bed. She gave her head a slight shake. “I still don’t know if he’s reacting to the medicines. He still seems so flat.” She gestured toward the rise and fall of his chest.

Jack nodded. He understood what she meant. All of Zane’s accessory muscles were working around his chest area. With ventilation and sedation he should be in a much more stable position. It was almost as if his body was fighting against everything.

Aaron seemed much more settled. His heart rate, temperature and blood pressure were good. It seemed that he was reacting better to the treatments and medications.

The lights flickered again and the television monitor in the room across the hall shorted out. The nurse’s face paled. “This is it,” she said warily. “The TV signal is gone. The hurricane is about to hit.”

Amber appeared back in the doorway. She looked awful. “What do you do next?”

The nurse gave the briefest shake of her head. “Hunker down.”

* * *

For the next four hours they held their breaths as they waited to see if they would come out the other side of the hurricane. It didn’t matter they were in the basement with no windows or possibility of flying glass. At times the whole foundation of the building seemed to shudder and Jack wondered if the whole hospital could end up on top of them. Doors and windows throughout the hospital must have been affected as the doorway to the stairwell at the end of the corridor continued to rattle incessantly. It was impossible to stay still for four hours. They had patients to look after, and Jack couldn’t help but worry about the patients above them and the people outside. They tiptoed around each other in a kind of unspoken frustration. The phone lines had died. Between them they’d managed to reach fourteen of the local people who had stayed overnight in the same accommodation as Zane and Aaron.

“I thought the eye of the hurricane was supposed to be silent. Quiet even,” he said to one of the older nurses.

She shook her head. “Maybe in a movie. Or in a fairy tale. I’ve only seen two hurricanes. And there was no silence. Except when they were over. We’re being hit by the fiercest part of the storm right now. Anything or anybody out there right now probably doesn’t stand a chance. Anything not anchored or cemented to the ground will likely never be seen again. Or end up on one of the other islands.” She sighed, and he realized she must be thinking about her family on Oahu. He put his hand on her arm.

“I’m sure they’re safe. Just like we are.”

She gave the briefest of nods and then marched over to the monitors and started pressing buttons again. Jack was exasperated. He needed to be doing something. Anything. But he’d done everything he could down here.

Ty had been started on the antibiotics too. And he, in turn, had been concerned about his employees with young families.

Amber took the time to explain how meningitis passed from person to person and how, at the moment, unless an employee showed signs themselves, their families weren’t at risk.