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Normally he wouldn’t have to ask how long. Normally his chattering partner freely gave information during flight.
She still didn’t look at him, but she did let go of the controls with one hand to point. “There. We’re landing on the roof next door.”
Taciturn. Definitely something wrong. If he didn’t expect to need her paramedic skills, he’d put her on light duty for this run. But the patient they were flying to was a steel worker who’d fallen from the beams of a new construction site. Since they’d called for an ambulance rather than a coroner, all he knew for sure was that he’d need her at her best.
“We’re bypassing the stretcher. I don’t know what the site looks like, the board is the only safe bet. Are you well enough to carry it?”
She did look at him then, her eyes narrowing to slits. “I can do my job. I’m fine.”
Gabriel didn’t argue with her, but he’d never heard the words “I’m fine” and had it be anything near fine. Even if she put up a fight to stay on the job anytime she was ill, she’d never looked so put out with him over asking.
With an easy touch, she put the chopper down atop the neighboring building, and he unstrapped and went to grab bags.
“Get the board,” he ordered, wrenching open the sliding door and hopping out to make a run for the roof access door.
It always took her a moment longer to disembark due to having to power down the chopper. Him running ahead to the patient was part of their usual routine as every second mattered and he did whatever he could as she brought up the rear.
He hit the stairs running, and took all eighteen stories down on foot. Waiting for the elevator always slowed them down.
Across the lobby with a nod to Security, he bustled out the door and rounded the building. Just as he reached the construction site, the manager met him, slapped a hard hat onto his head and led the way across the dirt and gravel lot, around piles of construction material, to the concrete pad beneath steel beams, and his patient.
No blood haloing his head, a good sign and something he’d seen enough on the job with jumpers and falls from great height. Heads didn’t stand up well to concrete, unless they didn’t hit first. The man had landed on his feet, at least briefly, and his head had probably hit last.
Gabriel fell to the man’s side.
Unconscious.
Breathing fast.
He felt for a pulse, found a rapid rate to go with the breathing.
“How long ago was it?” He began gathering information as he fished out a penlight to check pupils. One responsive, the other fixed.
“Less than ten minutes.”
“How far did he fall?” Gabriel looked up again at the open beams for one that would align with the man’s location.
“About thirty feet. That beam there.”
Onto concrete.
When he lowered his eyes again, he saw Penny running full tilt across the construction site—without a hard hat but with the backboard held over her head. That would help a little if someone dropped something on her.
“Get her a hat,” he said to the manager, then went back to his patient.
When she reached him, she put the board down alongside the patient and then began digging into his bag to help, extracting a neck brace first thing. A hat made it to her head, but didn’t slow her down.
“How’s he doing? What’s his name?”
He hadn’t asked.
“Frank,” someone answered, and Penny thanked him, then started talking to Unconscious Frank as she fitted the brace around his neck, explaining what she was doing, as was proper.
“He’s seen better days. There’s some kind of cranial hemorrhage or swelling, one pupil unresponsive. And I think internal bleeding, his heart is going hard. Get a line in him, saline.”
He ordered, she complied. That was the one thing unchanged since their unfortunate encounter—she always worked hard and fast. Competent, and something more. She may have been born to society, but she’d managed to become compassionate in a hands-on way, and it made a difference in the way she treated their patients. She might not be one hundred percent today, but she was still fighting for them.
A whole family of doctors, and she’d become a paramedic. He should ask her why sometime, but knowing her adrenaline junkie tendencies, paramedic fit. They were the first on the scene for the big emergencies.
Opening the man’s shirt, he looked his belly and chest over, noted bruising on his left rib cage, then began to feel his belly for telltale signs of bleeding.
Like the turgid area on the left upper quadrant. “How’s the line?”
She flushed the catheter she’d just inserted into the man’s arm, nodded, and then hooked up a saline line to it. “We’re good. I’m going to pin it to your suit. It’s wide open, do you want it slower?”
“No, his spleen is ruptured, I don’t know how badly. Run the drip wide open. We have to get him in the air.” He lifted his head out of the way and Penny produced a massive safety pin from somewhere, and clipped the saline line to the shoulder of his suit.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of protocol taught in medical training, but she’d done it before. Once they got to the chopper, she’d have to fly them to the hospital, and unclipping it from her own shoulder to free her to fly would slow them down. The first time she’d done it, he’d been surprised, but over their months, working together, her unusual methods had ceased to be strange. She always had a reason for the things she did, and he didn’t doubt she had a reason to be so pale and stiff-lipped now. Which was what worried him.
“Get his legs,” he ordered once the bag swung from his shoulder, and waited until she was there. On the count of three they lifted, moved, and lowered their patient, then secured straps.
“You and you, help me carry him,” he said to the manager and another strong-looking worker watching them. “Let my pilot run ahead and get the chopper running so we don’t lose any time.”
Penny waited until they’d started moving, then went to take his bag of supplies, swung it over her shoulder, and ran. She would push the button for the elevator and have Security hold it for them while she took the stairs. That was how she worked. She thought ahead, and he was grateful for that.
So, whatever was wrong, she was probably handling it. Maybe he should just let her handle it. The problem was, he had to be the one who forced her home when she did get ill, or would admit to being ill. It had become a happily infrequent part of his job description, but a part nevertheless.
By the time they’d reached the chopper, the blades were whirring. They got Frank loaded quickly and he put his headset on.
“They’re already prepping an OR.” Penny’s voice came through the comm. “A surgical team’s going to meet us at the roof to type him for transfusion.”
“What did you report?” He locked himself into the jump seat over his patient, and while she flew he affixed leads for the portable heart monitor and checked again for pupil dilation.
“Internal bleeding, most likely splenic rupture, irregular pupil reaction, possibly some kind of spinal damage, and unconsciousness.”
All that was the most she’d said to him all day.
“Okay.” He called in another update, laying on the need for an MRI, then asked over the comm, “Why did you suggest spinal damage?”
“Skydiving. Landing jars badly.”
Not his favorite answer, but not wrong either. Leave it to Penny to frame things in terms of extreme sports activities, that was like her. Answering with so few words on a subject she could chatter hours about usually? Again, not like her.
No matter how hard she’d hit the ground running today, something was definitely wrong.
* * *
As soon as they’d handed over their patient to the surgical team atop Manhattan Mercy, Gabriel took Penny’s elbow to keep her from following the team inside. Not letting himself touch her had been another way to keep temptation at bay, and even this casual, platonic touch to her arm felt exasperatingly intimate to him. But it had a purpose.
She turned to look at him, her elbow held out from her body at an unnatural angle, her brows up in question. On top of the high building, the wind blew loudly enough that talking meant shouting, even with the helicopter blades silent. He jerked his head back toward the chopper.
“You want to go somewhere?” She was nearly shouting over the wind, eyeing his hand on her arm again. It wasn’t as though he gripped her in anger, though he’d admit frustration at having to have this conversation again, and his grip wasn’t strong enough to hurt. Sometimes he had to grab her to keep her from flitting away.
A quick shake of his head and he answered with one word. “Talk.”
The flare of wariness in her blue eyes only firmed his resolve. He released her, went and opened the sliding side door, climbed in, and scooted to make room for her.
If he hadn’t suspected anything before, the way she looked at the sky, at her feet, and generally stalled for time would’ve given it all away.
She had to talk herself into speaking with him.
After about half a minute, she squared her shoulders and marched over to board the helicopter, nearly closing the door behind her. It was enough to dampen the wind and make this conversation less stressful than it would’ve been if it had to start from a position of yelling, but remained open enough for easy escape.
She perched on the edge of the seat, one hand staying on the door handle, and looked at him. “What do you want to talk about?”
So ready to fly.
“You know what I want to talk about. You shot me a nasty look, but you never actually answered me. Are you ill? Because you look like hell.”
Blunt. Maybe a little too blunt, but if that was what it took to get through to her, so be it.
“I’m fine.”
“Pale. Black circles. No motormouth. No music before flying. No band radio. You didn’t even know we’d been called out. Want to revise your statement?”
“That was a mistake. Normal people do make mistakes sometimes!”
“Fine. If you want to stick to the Not Sick story, then are you hungover? Are you distracted by whatever last night’s festivities were?”
“Oh. My. God. You’re jealous? That’s what this is?”
She couldn’t have shocked him more if she’d just decked him.
They’d made an agreement! And the only way to keep up his end was to refuse to rise to the bait.
“I have plans to be alive tomorrow. A distracted pilot is a bad pilot.”
“Did I fly badly?” Her voice rose, bringing it right back to near shouting level. “Did I perform badly today?”
“No.”
“No. I did my job just fine.”
“You’re distracted, at the very least, and you’re a distraction. Whether or not you’re willing to admit it. I can’t focus on the patients if I’m constantly checking on you to make sure you’re still upright.”
“I’m not sick—”
“I don’t care.” He cut her off. “Do whatever it is you need to do to function at your usual level. Do shifts in Emergency until then, I don’t want you on my crew. I’ll get another pilot.”
A fierce blush washed into her cheeks but didn’t detract from her paleness. It actually amplified how very pale she was against that bright red contrast.
“I’m so glad that you don’t care.”
Still shouting...
“Since you don’t care, and I know you don’t because we’re not friends, this is probably the perfect time to put your mind at ease. It’s not an illness.”
She never liked him questioning her over sickness, which had always bugged him, like he should feel guilty for being concerned about her or about their patients. But this was extreme, even for her. His neck prickled and he fought the urge to touch her again, but this time because he wanted the connection that was still there. But her reaction was so far outside the bounds of normal, he couldn’t be certain it wouldn’t make things worse.
She ripped open the sliding door, climbed out, then forced her hand into a pocket on her suit. In the next instant she had something in hand, but before he could identify it, the thing bounced off his left cheek and she slammed the door.
She’d thrown something at his face.
He didn’t know whether to go after her or let her stomp off.
A glance down confirmed the thing had bounced out of his field of vision. With a sigh, he bent forward to look beneath the seats.
There was some stretching and, although he’d spotted it, to reach it he had to smash his face against the front seatback and feel blindly.
As soon as his fingers curled around the length of it, his stomach bottomed out.
He knew very few things that shape.
And only one that could be an answer to what wasn’t an illness.
He straightened, pulling his hand from beneath the seat, and looked down as his heart beat louder and louder, like thundering rotors.
Positive.
CHAPTER TWO (#ucd27e015-8e66-5f10-adae-7cdade0b876c)
NO SOONER WAS Penny off the roof than she was jogging for the stairwell. A woman couldn’t make an exit like that and then be easy to find...in the extremely unlikely chance that a real, flesh-and-blood man would behave like a movie hero and chase after her. Not that she wanted him to, she’d just bounced a pregnancy test off his face.
She hit the stairs two at a time to head for her supervisor’s office. Gabriel had demanded she go home, and she’d take that advice. Not because she was underperforming, she wasn’t, but she’d be lying if she pretended she wasn’t distracted. She was. And she’d be lying to herself if she tried to pretend she wasn’t tired. Emotionally tired or physically, she had no clue, but both should resolve with the same treatment: a nap.
However, there was one accusation she would cop to that had no bearing on the situation—she definitely was behaving differently than normal, and it was hard to be filled with supercharged optimism when you felt like you were in an uncontrollable spin without a fixed point on the horizon to guide you.
Once she’d begged off for the afternoon, she hurried out and summoned a cab. Earbuds and her streaming music service allowed her to shut down for the ride home. It wasn’t until she opened the door into her own private space that guilt began to ooze from her chest. She could feel it rising off her like toxic vapor.
She should’ve told Gabriel more gently and she really shouldn’t have thrown the test at his head. He hadn’t deserved that. But he’d just hit that sore spot, maybe unknowingly, and her knees had jerked. In those few words he’d made her feel she was on the cusp of being rendered helpless again, like a wheelchair waited around the corner, crouched and sinister. Like any second she’d revert to being an observer in her own life.
The flight suit she always changed out of before coming home still hung on her, so she dropped her bag on the way to the stairs to her bedroom loft above to go change into something lounge-worthy, then headed back down to fling herself onto the sofa.
If it was already two months in, she’d have seven, or something, to go. She should make an appointment with a doctor she didn’t share genetics with. But how long before she was shuffled off to the side just by virtue of being pregnant, regardless of how healthy she remained during her pregnancy? How long before they took her off the chopper and made her work every rotation on the floor in the emergency department?
How long before she was sidelined by her baby?
She stared into the open rafters above, sighing at herself. There was a worse emotion to attach to an innocent baby than disappointment. Resentment.
