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‘And he’s breathing?’
‘For now,’ Kaspar said quietly. ‘But with the soft tissue swelling and oedema there’s still a risk of delayed airway compromise, while haemorrhage from vessels in the open wounds or severe nasal bleeding from complex blood supply could contribute to airway obstruction.’
‘Okay, so the mask is out, given the damage to his face, supraglottic devices are out because of his jaw, and intubation is out because if the blast caused trauma to the larynx and trachea, any further swelling could potentially displace the epiglottis, the vocal cords and the arytenoid cartilage.’
The trauma doctor ran through the list quickly, efficiently. He was pretty good—something Kaspar always liked to see.
‘One more thing,’ Kaspar noted. ‘There’s a possible cervical injury.’
‘One p.m. So we’ve got a high risk of a full stomach after lunch, which means increased risk of regurgitation and aspiration of gastric contents. I could insert a nasogastric tube or I could apply cricoid pressure, but either of those procedures could worsen his larynx and airway injuries.’
At least the guy was thinking.
‘Yes,’ Kaspar agreed slowly, not wanting to step on anyone’s toes. Ultimately, this was the trauma doctor’s scene. He himself might be a surgeon, but today he was a skydiver on his day off. ‘Still, I’m not confident that his airway will hold without intervention.’
‘Can’t intubate, can’t ventilate,’ Tom mused. ‘Which leaves a surgical airway option. Tracheotomy or cricothyroidotomy.’
‘I’d say so,’ Kaspar concurred, thrusting his hands in his pockets to keep from taking over. The doctor was actually good, but Kaspar knew he’d be faster, sharper. It was, after all, his field of expertise.
It was the one thing that gave him value in this world. Every patient. Every procedure. They mattered. As though a part of him imagined that each successful outcome could somehow make up for his unthinking actions that one night with a couple of drunken idiots. As though it could somehow redress the balance. A hundred good deeds, a thousand of them, to make up for that one stupid, costly error of judgement.
But it never would.
Because it hadn’t been merely a mistake. It had been a loss of control. The kind that was all too reminiscent of his volatile father.
The kind that Peter Coates had tried to teach him never to lose.
The memories burned brightly—too brightly—in his head. It must be why he was feeling so disorientated. He’d thought the jump would help, but jumping with that woman had somehow heightened it all.
A familiar anger wound its way inside him. Even now, all these years later. All his awards, his battlefield medals, the way the media lauded him meant nothing.
In many respects he was glad that Archie woman was gone. She was, for some inexplicable reason, far too unsettling. The way she’d looked at him on that plane. As though seeing past the playboy front and believing he would do the right thing and help her.
He couldn’t explain it, but she didn’t look at him the way almost everyone else in his life looked at him. She didn’t look at him as though calculating what being with him would do for her career, or reputation, or fame. In fact, she’d looked at him with eyes so heavy with meaning he hadn’t been able to stop himself from wondering what it was she’d seen. Why she made him feel more exposed than anyone had in long, long time.
It made no sense. And Kaspar hated things not making sense.
Just as he hated the part of him that had wondered whether, when this was over and the patient was safely on board the air ambulance, he might head back to the fete or the hangar and perhaps buy her a coffee. Or a celebratory drink that night.
For the first time in a long time the idea of a date actually made him feel...alive.
‘Want to do the honours?’
Tom’s voice broke into his thoughts.
‘You’re the on-duty trauma doctor.’ Kaspar hesitated, fighting the compulsion to jump straight in, needing to be sure. Not to protect himself but to protect the hospital. He owed them that much. ‘And you’re good.’
‘I am.’ There was nothing boastful about the way the doctor said it. Simply factual. Exactly as Kaspar might have said it. ‘But you’re the oral and maxillofacial specialist, it’s right up your street and this is a particularly complex patient. I can’t afford to make a wrong move. If anyone is going to be able to stabilise him enough to survive the flight, it’s going to be you.’
‘Fine,’ Kaspar acknowledged. It was all he needed to hear.
He bent his head to concentrate on the job he loved best, and pushed all other thoughts from his mind. He wouldn’t think any more about Archie. He wouldn’t be taking her for a drink that night. And he certainly wouldn’t be attending the charity wrap party.
* * *
The party was in full swing and, predictably, people were crowding around him, from awed wannabe colleagues to seductive wannabe girlfriends.
But there was only one person from whom Kasper couldn’t seem to drag his gaze.
It was ludicrous. So uncharacteristic. Yet it felt inexorable.
He hadn’t been able to eject her from his thoughts since the skydive, however hard he’d tried. And he wasn’t a man accustomed to failure—as a surgeon he had one of the highest success rates—which made it all the more incredible that banishing one woman from his thoughts was defeating him. If anything, with each day that passed she’d become more of a delicious enigma until he’d found himself powerless to resist coming here tonight.
Just on the off chance that he might see her again.
When was the last time a woman had done that to him?
Had any woman? Ever?
He tipped his head in consideration, finally allowing himself to give in to impulse.
Archie was stunning. Not necessarily in looks, although she was certainly very pretty, from her sexy pair of look-at-me heels to legs that seemed to go on for ever before they finally slipped beneath a short, Latin-inspired, tasselled dance dress number, showing off perhaps the shapeliest pair of legs he ever recalled seeing. He couldn’t seem to help himself, but he practically imagined her wrapping them around his body as he sank into her, so deep that she wouldn’t know where he ended and she began.
His body tightened just thinking about it.
Him. Kaspar Athari.
He had never wanted any woman quite like this.
He’d never wanted quite like this.
He’d had enough women throwing themselves at him on practically a weekly basis that he’d never had to lust after any woman quite so...helplessly. Not the most stunning supermodels, or the most worshipped Hollywood starlets. But he was lusting after this perfectly pretty, perfectly cheeky, perfectly ordinary woman. Who, it turned out, was to him most extraordinary.
A little like the woman who had been too frightened to do the static line jump but who, when steering the tandem jump chute with him, had displayed a skill and eagerness that had belied his initial conclusion that she was a novice.
Against all logic, Kaspar found himself fascinated.
There was a story there. But what? And why did he even care?
Sexual attraction was one thing. But this was something else. Something...more. Certainly more than the physical. She possessed a magnetism in the aura she gave off and the way people gravitated towards her. Especially—and Kaspar gritted his teeth at the thought—the other men on the dance floor. Was he the only one to notice how she danced and twirled, shaking and shimmying quite mesmerisingly, and yet all the while deftly kept her friend between herself and any would-be suitors?
As if the intensity of his stare had finally reached her, she lifted her head, met his gaze and froze. Even from this distance, in this light, he could see the sweetest bloom staining her cheeks and down the elegant line of her neck, her chest rising and falling rapidly in a way that had nothing to do with the fact she’d been dancing. Or perhaps it was just the vividness of his imagination. Remembering the way she’d flushed in the plane the other day.
Either way, he was certain she was consumed by the same greedy fire as he was. The fire that had brought him here tonight, against every shred of logic.
And then she moved, heading off the floor and away from him. His stomach lurched in a way that was all too alien to him and before Kaspar knew what he was doing, he had set his untouched drink down on the bar behind him and was shifting his feet, ready to move. Not prepared to lose her.
Abruptly, her friend caught her and pulled her back. He kept waiting for them to glance in his direction, maybe share a giggle, which he’d seen from women time and again. A part of him almost welcomed it. It might help to topple her from whatever invisible pedestal on which he’d set her, help remind him that she was a woman like any other.
But it didn’t happen. If anything, Archie studiously avoided meeting his gaze again, and had clearly omitted to mention him to her friend, and her dignified discretion only seemed to add to her allure. Especially when she resumed dancing, only to be a little more self-conscious, a fraction stiffer than she had been before. It was the tell he needed, knowing now she was indeed equally attracted to him.
It should concern him more that it felt like such a victory.
Alarm bells were sounding but too faint, too distant to have the impact he suspected they should have had. To jolt him back to reality. To warn him that she didn’t look like the kind of woman who did one-night stands. She looked like the kind of woman who did walks along beaches, and romantic meals, and talking until dawn. Relationships. Love. It was such bull.
He’d seen first-hand the toxic depths to which such emotions could plunge. His parents’ explosive marriage had been equalled only by their acrimonious divorce. And him, in the middle of it all his life. Their pawn. The tool they’d used to goad and taunt each other. The burden they’d each tried to make the other one bear.
And not just his parents. What about his own explosiveness? That out-of-control side of him that had only had to emerge once to completely ruin someone’s life. He’d sworn it would never happen again, and it hadn’t. Some might call him emotionally detached, or unavailable. He wasn’t. Where his patients were concerned he felt as much empathy as he could, for patient and family, without it impairing his ability to do his job. It was only in his personal life where he exerted such emotional...discipline.
So he did sex. He did fun. He did mutual gratification.
He didn’t do intimacy and he didn’t do complications.
Something told him that this Archie woman was both, and the best thing he could do, for both of them, would be to stay away.
Turning back to the bar, Kaspar picked up his drink and tried not to be irritated by the group of preening, simpering women who had begun to cluster around his part of the bar. It was about as easy as pretending he wasn’t searching out blonde hair and a metallic shimmer in the reflection of the mirror behind the glasses.
Apparently, his skydiving butterfly was now edging her way off the opposite side of the dance floor. About as far away from him as she could get.
He didn’t give himself time for second-guessing. For the second time that evening, he set his untouched drink down and gave in to temptation.
CHAPTER THREE (#u815974e9-1c3d-5fe8-bd3e-6ecc3e768e3f)
‘ARCHIE, WAIT. SLOW DOWN. Where are you going this time?’
‘Relax,’ Archie cast over her shoulder, a bright smile plastered to her lips at her friend’s typically bossy tone. ‘I’m just going for a drink.’
Still, she didn’t slow down in her quest to get off the dance floor and around to the other side of an enormous pillar that would shield her from Kaspar’s view. No easy feat in the ridiculously high heels Katie had insisted on lending her to go with the seriously sexy metallic number her friend had also talked her into buying this afternoon.
It was years since she’d been out so called clubbing it—not that she’d ever had the time or inclination to go out all that often, neither was this charity wrap party exactly clubbing it—but, still, she hoped she hadn’t looked too awkward and robotic out there on the dance floor. She’d felt fine...right up until she’d seen him watching her.
The minute she’d spotted him, her body hadn’t quite felt her own. As though it wasn’t completely under her control. Even now the memory of his eyes scanning over her left her blood feeling as though it was effervescing through her veins, making her entire body hum.
It was an unfamiliar, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.
Ducking behind the pillar, Archie pressed her back against the cool, smooth concrete and rested her hand underneath her breastbone. She could feel the tattoo her heart was drumming out, leaving her unable to even catch her breath. And it had nothing to do with the dancing. Oh, she’d tried to ignore him, especially when his usual harem had draped themselves around him and he’d barely had the decency to offer any of them the time of day.
But who could ignore Kaspar Athari?
‘So, if you’re getting a drink why are we the other side of the room from the bar?’ Katie bobbed under her nose, her brow knitted.
‘Hmm? Oh. I just...needed to catch my breath.’
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but she might have known her old friend would see through it.
‘Archie, you’re about as jittery as a beachgoer trying to get across hot sand.’
‘No, I’m not.’
Katie’s eyes narrowed sharply.
‘Is this about “the Surgeon Prince of Persia”?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she managed loftily, only for Katie to snort in derision.
‘Yeah, sure you don’t. He’s been devouring you with his eyes all night and you’ve been lapping it up.’
‘I have not,’ Archie spluttered, her knotted stomach twisting and flipping. ‘And it hasn’t been all night. It has been half an hour at most.’
‘Aha!’ Katie declared triumphantly. ‘So it is about the perennially sexy Kaspar Athari.’
‘No...not at all...well, not really. That is... Why are you frowning? Aren’t you the one who said I needed to get back out there and have fun, like we used to in uni? Like I did before my dad...died? Before I married Joe?’
She tailed off awkwardly as Katie pulled a face.
‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I always hated the way you changed when you married Joe. You went right into yourself. Nothing like the fun, sassy Archie I’d come to know.’
‘It wasn’t Joe who did that.’ Archie wrinkled her nose. She’d tried a hundred times to explain it to Katie, but her friend had never quite understood. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she owed it to Joe to try again. ‘He was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.’
‘I disagree.’
‘I know you do. You remind me often enough.’
Still, there was no rancour in Archie’s tone. In many respects it was buoying that her friend cared enough to do so. And Katie’s wry smile of response revealed that she knew it, too.
‘I just feel that, while he may not have intended to, Joe took advantage of the fact that you were young and na?ve. You were grieving for your dad, and your brother and his new wife were half a world away.’
They were falling into a conversation they’d had a hundred times before, but it was impossible to stop.
‘He didn’t take advantage. It was mutually beneficial.’
Katie’s eyebrows were practically lost in her hairline, but at least she had the tact not to bring up any painful reminders of more than three years of failed pregnancy attempts. The miscarriage at eighteen weeks.
Agony seared through her. Black, almost debilitating.
Faith.
As though it didn’t lacerate her from the inside out just thinking her unborn daughter’s name.
She swayed dangerously.
Had it not been for the silent, supportive hand at her elbow, Archie was afraid she was about to tumble to the floor. She blinked at Katie gratefully. Unspoken, unequivocal support shone back at Archie. Bolstering her. Making her want to forget the fact that, barely a year after she’d lost her unborn daughter, Joe was expecting a baby with his new wife.
It hurt.
Though not, perhaps, in precisely the way Archie might have thought it would. She couldn’t pinpoint it, but neither could she help suspecting that it had less to do with Joe than it ought to, and more to do with the simple pain that another woman seemed to find it so easy to have a baby while her own traitorous body hadn’t been able to do the one thing she felt it had surely been designed to do.
‘Fine, let’s say it was mutually beneficial...’ Katie conceded at length, though Archie could hear by her friend’s tone that she didn’t remotely believe that.
