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Airborne Emergency
Olivia Gates
Fasten your seatbelts… turbulence ahead!Surgeon Cassandra St. James can't wait to join the Global Aid Organization's new flying Jet Hospital. Nothing could be more thrilling and challenging… until she encounters mission leader Vidal Santiago.What is this millionaire plastic surgeon, the man she loves and loathes, doing on a humanitarian mission? Has Cassandra misjudged him? And can the jet-setting surgeons control the unwanted passion that flares between them?
The fierceness of that silver gaze was too much to take head-on.
Heat surged in her head, cascaded all over her body. Her face had to be radiating a red as deep as her hair by now. Her eyes escaped his, only to stray over the rest of him, and—wow! Everywhere she looked, every detail of his striking features and awesome physique—and the thoughts they provoked—were even more blush-worthy.
But something was wrong here. Very wrong. Besides feeling like a derailed train, she felt as if she knew him—as if she should know him.
Then it struck her. Hard, then harder. With the force of a jackhammer right upside her head.
No wonder she felt she’d known him all her life.
She had…
Dear Reader
I’ve always believed heroes are not born but made. I also believe heroes don’t know they’re heroes—not even when others insist on it. This lack of self-satisfaction is what marks a true hero for me. Vidal, my hero, never suspected he was one—even feared he was the reverse. Both he and Cassandra, my heroine, started out in a wrong place in life, but worked unstintingly to become the best people they could.
I love to explore the life path of people who better themselves, people I can cheer for, fear for, and find total satisfaction when they get the happily-ever-after they deserve. I loved going along for the ride as Vidal and Cassandra made life-changing adjustments and discoveries, and struggled with their prejudices and misconceptions—about themselves and each other.
I hope you will enjoy the ride too.
Olivia Gates
Recent titles by the same author:
EMERGENCY MARRIAGE
DOCTORS ON THE FRONTLINE
Airborne Emergency
Olivia Gates
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
Chapter One (#u63419d0f-6999-5b1d-976a-3b22567576f8)
Chapter Two (#u466e00e9-46c5-5f14-92ba-7e00c8a9dae9)
Chapter Three (#uc84e3464-e915-5679-b3af-bf04eba91bc3)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
For my father. The power behind my soul,
the vision behind my being. You live on in me.
CHAPTER ONE
“OF ALL names, my new boss had to be a Vidal.”
Cassandra St James winced. She was talking to herself out loud, sounding like a hissing cobra, no less. No wonder the woman ahead of her in the queue had given her that funny look.
What was really funny was that just his name still raised her hackles this way. Brought every sort of fierce nastiness she thought she’d outgrown bubbling to the surface again.
So their mission leader, the man they were transiting in Madrid Airport to pick up, was blighted at birth with ‘the name’. Him and a million other men in Spanish-speaking communities. Her Vidal was an Arroyo Martinez. He must be in some hyper-advanced surgical center, performing million-dollar esthetic miracles. Her new boss was a Santiago, and he was devoting three months to a grueling, payless humanitarian mission.
She shook her head, paid for her breakfast, tossed her mane of curls back. Better focus on something else. Her life’s much-needed new direction, for example. That began today. Her plans to explore new medical frontiers, to break the monotony and the dead ends, were in motion at last. And from the way she saw—saw...
Eyes. Steel and silver. They slammed into her across the huge, bustling cafeteria and held her prisoner. Wouldn’t let her look anywhere else. Not even at the face they belonged to.
Her heart lurched and the next scheduled breath just wouldn’t come.
Whoa! What was that? She didn’t do that. Didn’t do instant overwhelming attraction and X-rated thoughts. Or delayed ones, for that matter. Didn’t go hot and gooey when a man looked at her. And the man was just looking at her.
OK, so no one had ever looked at her that way—ogled her blatantly, sure, especially since she’d set foot in this land of self-appointed Latin lovers—but this...this devouring was something else altogether.
People passed in front of her, blocking her vision, severing the connection.
Oh, thank you! She made use of the time out, reached one of the elegant plate-glass tables, swore softly when she splashed cappuccino over her French pastry.
Don’t look. She did. She had to, to find out just what that bolt of chemical reaction was all about. Bodies still blocked her view. Then suddenly she had a clear shot of him again and...he was no longer on the other side of the cafeteria!
He was cutting his way through the packed crowds, head and shoulders above other people. Coming to her. Oh, wow!
Her mind stuttered to a standstill as his purposeful stride eliminated the gap between them, then kicked off again, in a jumble.
He was going to talk to her. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, yes! But what would he say? What would she say? She must look hideous. Her hair was a worse-than-usual mess. Not even lip gloss. She must still be puffed up with that horrible deathlike sleep on board the plane—not that those lethal eyes said anything, but—
A bloodcurdling shriek went through her like a scythe.
Cassandra jerked around, but not before she saw his eyes snapping from consuming to concerned as they refocused behind her, searching out the source of distress.
The shrieks continued, rising to a manic pitch. People were running, some away from the source of disturbance. That added to her confusion until she remembered where they were. In an airport screams might easily be interpreted as some sort of danger. Her first impulse was to rush to help. It must be all her medical training, and probably her knight-to-the-rescue genes as well.
Shouts in many languages echoed. She made out enough to know there’d been an accident. Someone—a child—was injured, unconscious.
She was running by now, towards the milling crowd. He was ahead of her, his growls cutting a clear path to the victim in seconds.
It wasn’t as easy for her. The crowd closed up again in his wake, didn’t part for her as it had for him. She had to shove and elbow away layer after layer of onlookers, trying to get to the object of their horrified fascination.
Her shouts of, “Let me pass. I’m a doctor,” didn’t make any impression on the predominantly Spanish audience. Then she heard his voice again, snapping something in Spanish, and suddenly she had a front-row view of the emergency.
A hysterical woman being restrained, dragged away. A motionless boy on the floor, or at least a head of golden hair. The rest of him was obscured by the man’s huge crouching body. He was already administering CPR.
She groaned. So the boy had arrested. If the man could judge that. And he’d volunteered to resuscitate him—probably on the strength of a technique picked up from some medical TV drama.
Falling to her knees beside him, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Señor? I can take over while you make sure an ambulance is on its way. I’m a doctor.”
He withdrew to deliver cardiac compressions, didn’t even look at her. “I got that already.”
She started. His voice—a bass rasp that was just as potent as the rest of him. Concise, cultured. And American. American?
Later. Focus! “Great, so if you’ll just...” Her eyes fell on the boy’s face before the man swooped to deliver another breath and the words stopped in her throat. The boy’s mouth—it was burned!
Fighting off the wave of horror that years of handling the worst medicine had to offer hadn’t eradicated, Cassandra’s eyes darted around, summing up the situation. A boy of less than three. A pretty plastic tree a few feet away with dangling electric toy planets. They’d been glowing minutes ago. Not any more.
The boy must have bitten the electric cord to pluck one off.
Her stomach heaved again. The center of the burn encompassed both lips in a two-inch, grayish-white, depressed area: the current’s point of entry. Electrical burns were far worse than thermal ones as the current arcing through the tissues damaged everything along their path down to the bone. This one, when it healed, would look awful and result in horrible complications, from mouth contraction to tongue adhesions to bone involvement, causing everything from disfigurement to drooling to speech impairment.
But she was way ahead of herself here. No point worrying about those burns now. Keeping the boy’s circulation going and oxygen reaching his brain was the number-one priority. She’d better take over and make sure the kid got the best chance. This guy might have taken a course in resuscitation, but young children needed a totally different resuscitation protocol than adults. What would be perfect technique for an adult, or even an older child, would crush the boy’s chest with the hard, two-handed compressions, or burst his lungs with the forced ventilation. Even if he knew enough not to be too forceful, he would probably not know that the 80 compressions and the 16 breaths per minute of the usual CPR would be too few to make any difference.
“Sir...” The man withdrew from a breath and she noticed his technique for the first time. It shut her up again.
One large hand pressed down with rapid, shallow compressions. She counted them—at this rate, they’d be an optimum 120 per minute. The other hand had two fingers locating the right position on the sternum, just below the nipple line. The five-to-one ratio of compressions to breaths resulted in 25 breaths per minute, delivered with just the right force. Everything done to the letter of advanced life support protocols for a child that age.
No—not TV-trained after all. This man knew what he was doing. And then some.
Feeling redundant all of a sudden, she fell back on her heels, taking stock, her heart itching at the idea that the man was adding further injury to the mutilated tissues every time he delivered a breath into the boy’s inert lungs. Not that that could be helped.
The mother’s wailing filtered through to her from a distance. What she must be feeling—the sheer horror and despair! But, then, she hadn’t been watching her little one closely enough and she... Cassandra’s censorious thoughts stumbled, hot shame squashing them.
Look who’s being holier than thou, she thought. Safeguarding kids every minute of the day was one of life’s impossibilities. She could vouch for that. What about the right-on-his-head dive Aaron had taken out of his crib, in front of both Amanda and herself? Luckily, he had been OK. No thanks to them.
Her focus returned to the crisis. So the man was delivering first-rate CPR. Working with the presumption it would prove effective, she should assess the boy’s other injuries—other burns, any limb angulations. The generalized muscular contraction the jolt must have caused could have been violent enough to fracture bones.
The next second, coughing brought her out of her absorbed examination. The man’s coughing.
Still coughing yet not missing a beat, he looked up and she again felt as the boy must have felt the moment that devastating current had arced through his body.
“You a real doctor?” he panted.
Her mind was shut down, but her smart mouth must have been on auto. “No, I’m just a surgeon.”
He came up from the next breath with the banked fire in his eyes flaring, promising sensual retribution. Later, they said. Now he only rasped, “OK, Dr Surgeon—take over respiration.”
She swooped down for the next breath, cringing at having to bear down on the boy’s burnt lips but forcing herself to form a tight seal over his mouth. The man immediately set up a perfect rhythm of compressions with her, then went into another coughing fit.
“Good thing you’re here,” he gasped once he’d brought himself under control. “No reason to inoculate the kid with more of my resistant strains.”
OK, not just a highly trained bystander, then. That was doctor-talk.
“That is,” the man added, his voice dipping lower, “if we manage to save him.”
Cassandra’s heart lurched. “We will!” she gasped after the last breath.
“Hold that thought.” He looked up at one of the men standing above her and fired rapid Spanish at him. The bystander rushed to get his cellphone out of his jacket pocket then, following his directions, called a number and placed the phone to his ear. He shot out a string of what sounded like commands into the phone, then nodded to the man, who removed the phone and placed it back into his pocket.
Curiosity overwhelmed her. Who had he called? And how come he sounded perfectly American one moment then clearly Spanish the next? No time, and no breath left to ask. From then on they resumed their efforts in silence, snatching eloquent glances every time she raised her head from a breath. At least, she thought they were eloquent. She felt they were exchanging their gratitude for sharing the massive responsibility with each other. Admitting their strong attraction.
She could also just be hyperventilating.
But she hadn’t been when that bolt had hit her a few minutes ago. All right, so she had been hit by bolts like that before. But she hadn’t been a thirty-year-old then. Merely a stupid teenager who’d just discovered her sexuality and had gone about picking the most disastrous choice to be the focus of her infatuation...
Rushing feet announced the paramedics’ arrival, breaking into her untimely musings. How long had it taken them to make it here? And who had the man called? She’d lost track of time, felt as if she’d been fighting for the kid’s life for a day— drowning in his eyes all her life...
His curt words brought her back to the crisis. “Get a bag-valve mask, a cardiac monitor, the defibrillator, and cut his clothes!”
Yes, definitely a doctor. And he wasn’t relinquishing their victim to the paramedics’ care. Good—she wasn’t about to either. She was seeing this through.
“But it’s been over fifteen minutes, and if he’s still in arrest—” one of the paramedics started, but the man cut him short.
“I started CPR almost immediately.”
“But still...”
“Did no one report he’d been electrocuted?”
That stopped the paramedic’s arguments. In electrocution, since the heart had no underlying disease causing the arrest, resuscitation should continue for far longer than for any other cause of arrest. There was always hope an electrocuted victim could revive after protracted resuscitation efforts.
She delivered one last breath before snatching the bag-valve mask from a female paramedic’s hands, sealing it over the boy’s face and beginning positive pressure ventilation with 100 per cent oxygen. The man stopped the cardiac compressions to attach the cardiac monitor’s electrodes to the boy’s chest.
Following through with her ventilatory assessment, Cassandra grabbed a stethoscope and listened to the chest. “Chest rising well, equal air entry over both lungs.”
The man nodded, finger on the boy’s carotid artery, eyes on the monitor. He added his own assessment. “Still pulseless, though—heart’s in ventricular fibrillation.” He turned to the paramedics.
“Charge the defibrillator.”
In seconds they’d handed him the paddles of the defibrillator.
“Everyone, clear!” he shouted.
