When The Right One Comes Along

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Cal threw his hands skyward in annoyance. Scout immediately sat up, ears pricked. Cal sent him a hand signal and calmed himself. “I don’t have time for this. I have work to do.”

“Unless you want serious complications, you will make the time.” Cal’s brows drew together in a menacing V. Before he could say anything, she raised a hand. “I wouldn’t send you to the hospital if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. We’re going to be swamped, and I want to make sure we provide care to those who need it most. You understand the triage process, correct?”

The V deepened, but he nodded.

“I triaged you as ‘urgent.’ You know that means you need medical attention at Ocean Crest, for treatment, stiches and—if you can’t be more specific about when you had your last one—a tetanus shot, as well. Finally, I want X-rays. As deep as that wound is and based on how it occurred, as I said I can’t discount a possible hairline fracture of your femur.”

“Okay. I get it.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys.

“You can’t be serious!”

“What?”

“You’re planning to drive yourself to the hospital?” She was incredulous.

“Yeah,” he responded, hesitancy in his voice. “I can drive.” He sounded a bit like a petulant child.

“Right. Try again to put some weight on that leg. Your right leg, I might add.”

Cal’s brows remained furrowed and he kept his eyes on hers—the green even brighter now than when she’d first locked eyes with him. She knew the instant he put some weight on the right leg, because he squeezed his eyes closed and his mouth formed a hard, straight line.

She reached out to steady him as he wobbled. “You were saying?” A hint of humor crept into her voice. She couldn’t help being a little smug. She was tired, cranky—and she was only human. “I know you’re a tough guy, but even you have your limits. Here’s an ambulance now. They’ll take you.” She signaled to the paramedic.

“Wait. What about Scout? They won’t let me take him in the ambulance, will they?”

Jessica frowned. She hadn’t thought of that. “No. That’s not possible.”

“I can’t leave him in my vehicle. It’s going to heat up again. It’s got a temperature-activated cooling system, but during the time I’ll be in the hospital, the truck will likely run out of gas and power.” He reached for the holster on his belt and found it empty. He looked around, apparently searching for someone. Police department personnel and other first responders at the site were still rushing around, all of them occupied in dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake.

He looked back at Jessica. “I need help.”

“You just had it. The hospital needs to take over now.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. Not medical aid. I need your help with Scout.”

She bent down, let Scout sniff her hand. “May I?” she asked. When Cal nodded, she rubbed his head. “In what way?”

“Well, I can’t take him to the hospital with me. I can’t leave him in my truck here in this heat. I lost my radio in the building and, as you can see, everyone from the department is busy.” He made a sweeping motion toward where the frenetic activity still continued. “I can’t impose on them.”

Jessica continued to stroke Scout but looked up at Cal. “What about someone else? A volunteer, maybe? Someone who lives close by? A friend?” She broke eye contact and turned her attention back to Scout. “Aren’t you a handsome boy,” she murmured. “So smart and handsome.”

“It won’t work,” he said, replying to her question. “Police dogs have their behavioral idiosyncrasies due to their specialized training. They need firm alpha handlers. Scout’s no different. I only moved here recently. Besides the other cops, I don’t have friends close enough for me to turn to.” He was silent for a moment. “How about you?”

Jessica glanced up at Cal. “Me? What about me?”

“Would you take Scout until I’m done at the hospital?”

“That’s impossible.”

“You said you were finished here.” A smile spread across his face, and Jessica felt an uncharacteristic pull of attraction. That was totally inappropriate with a patient, she chastised herself.

“You’ve already proven you can handle Scout,” Cal continued. “And Scout’s demonstrated that he’s willing to accept commands from you.” He chuckled. “Not a common occurrence for a police dog.”

Jessica straightened. At her full height and in her comfortable work flats, she was only a few inches shorter than the cop. She gaped at him. “You’re asking me to take Scout home with me?”

The smile faded. “Well, you’re not giving me a lot of options, Doc, triaging me as ‘urgent.’ So, yeah.”

She started to shake her head, but he broke in before she could speak. “I have no other alternative on such short notice. You triaged me, treated me and said I have to go to the hospital. If I can’t get someone to take care of Scout, that’s not happening. I’ll just have to drive myself and Scout home, using my left leg.”

She’d been working the better part of nineteen hours now. She just wanted to get a few hours’ sleep before she was due back at the hospital. She didn’t have time to deal with a rude, pushy cop. Jessica was tempted to call his bluff, but then she remembered what had gotten Cal into this predicament to begin with. He had saved people, including the little girl, Kayla. He’d risked his own life to rescue Scout. If he cared that much about his dog, she had no doubt that he’d follow through on his threat and try to drive. If anything happened to him and the dog as a consequence, she would blame herself. She swiped impatiently at her bangs to get them out of her eyes.

She nearly agreed, then realized what she was about to do. Get personally involved and care too much about another patient. Granted, this patient wasn’t a child. And, okay, it was actually the patient’s dog. But she was a trauma doc. Her job was done. Cal could figure out what to do himself. It seemed impossible that he didn’t have anyone to turn to, someone from the police department certainly, but it wasn’t her problem.

Then Cal gave a soft command to Scout. “Ask nicely.”

To Jessica’s astonishment, the big dog sat back on his haunches and raised his forelegs in the air. He crossed his front paws, tilted his head and whined in a manner that sounded a lot like “Please.”

Jessica chuckled. “That’ll get the bad guys to drop their guns and surrender.”

“Just wait. Scout, say your prayers.”

The dog bowed his head, and covered his eyes with his front paws.

Jessica laughed outright.

“How can you say no to that?”

Jessica crouched down again and scratched Scout’s ears. “I’m sure I’m going to regret this, but okay.”

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_d18d0aae-697a-56f8-b3a8-15fc7c2f8fb9)

CAL RESIGNED HIMSELF to the fact that he had to go to the hospital and needed to be transported by ambulance. The doc had been right; there was no way he could drive. He couldn’t even touch the ground with his right foot without agony. Since there were no crutches available, one of the paramedics had to help him hop over to the ambulance. Getting in the vehicle was no easy feat, either.

“Hell of a night,” the paramedic commented to Cal as they made their way through the broken streets to Ocean Crest Hospital. The sun had just started to rise.

“Yeah.” Cal gazed out the window. He absorbed the chaos and destruction around them as they sped toward the hospital. Having lost his radio in the building, he hadn’t been able to hear the reports. Now he listened to the scanner in the ambulance as the salient facts were recounted.

The Rose Canyon Fault ran in a north-south direction through San Diego County. But it had never been a major concern, to the best of his knowledge, because San Diego was relatively low risk for earthquakes. The fault was known to be capable of generating a 7.0 magnitude quake, with 8.0 at its upper range.

The quake they’d experienced was nearly at the fault’s limit. Cal knew that anything above 7.0 was considered a major earthquake, likely to cause serious damage. Anything over 8.0 could totally destroy communities near its epicenter.

As he continued to survey the damage, he could readily grasp how extensive it was. Even so, it could’ve been worse. There could’ve been a lot more damage...and many more casualties. The quake had been felt across great distances—as far away as Los Angeles, he’d heard—with damage mostly limited to a hundred and fifty miles from the epicenter. And the death toll? An update stated it could have been in the tens of thousands, but they’d been fortunate to have had reported fatalities of less than a hundred.

And Cal had found one of those. He thought of Kayla and wondered who would tell the little girl that her mother was gone. Would it be the doc who’d treated both of them?

He couldn’t remember having the sort of reaction to a woman that he’d had to the doctor, not in a long time. Very long, in fact, as it would’ve been before he was married to Anna. He’d barely looked at a woman since Anna blindsided him by leaving, taking Haley with her. His brother, Andrew, kept telling him he had “trust issues.” It almost made him laugh. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out or what had caused it.

He realized he’d been unpleasant to the doctor and she’d done nothing to provoke it. He supposed it had been a combination of the day he’d had and an involuntary defense mechanism against his attraction. Even with his nasty attitude, the doc had agreed to take care of Scout. He had to hand it to her. He didn’t think he would’ve been as magnanimous if their roles were reversed. He reached into his pocket to make sure the slip of paper with her cell phone number was there, then tried to block both Dr. Jessica Hansen and his daughter, Haley, out of his mind. Instead, he focused on the havoc around them.

Although Cal was a seasoned police officer, a ten-year veteran of the Narcotics Unit of the Lincoln Police Department in Nebraska, he was relatively new to the San Diego Police Department. In his short time with the SDPD, he and Scout had successfully concluded a variety of searches involving missing children, lost hikers and wandering hospital patients. They enjoyed what they did and worked well together, but he hadn’t expected to deal with a catastrophe of this magnitude. What should have been a relatively quick drive to Ocean Crest was taking quite a while because of the damage from the earthquake and resulting traffic jams. With time on his hands, he let his mind wander back to what had brought him here to begin with.

Cal had a beautiful five-year-old daughter, Haley, and he’d been happily married—or so he’d thought. He’d been thrown for a loop—stunned, really—when Anna had announced over a year ago that she could no longer tolerate being the wife of a cop. Maybe the trigger had made sense, since her declaration was prompted by the ransacking of their home by an associate of a drug dealer Cal had been instrumental in apprehending. Fortunately, Haley and Anna weren’t home at the time, but the occurrence had pushed Anna over the edge. She wanted out of the marriage. Even so, Cal could never have foreseen the sequence of events that resulted in an internal police investigation of his conduct—and all ties with his little girl severed. Anna had not just taken Haley, but had turned their daughter against him.

He’d felt angry, bitter and alone, and that hadn’t changed in the time since. The last thing he’d wanted during the year that had passed was another relationship. No wonder he’d reacted the way he had to the doctor after feeling that treacherous pull of attraction.

The messy split from his ex-wife had left Cal swearing off relationships. And the internal police investigation into his conduct caused him anger and disillusionment with his job. So he’d resigned from the Lincoln Police Department and relocated to San Diego, for no other reason than this was where his brother, Andrew, a schoolteacher, lived. He hadn’t much cared where he went. With no hope of seeing Haley in the near term, he just wanted to start a new and solitary life.

With Cal’s experience and solid references, the San Diego Police Department offered him the position of sergeant in their Narcotics Unit, but Cal had had enough of that area of policing. He’d worked closely with the narcotics dogs in Lincoln and he’d actually started his career in search and rescue; because of that, he accepted a lower-ranking position as a search-and-rescue officer in the department’s K-9 Unit. The role suited him well, he mused. With his recent experiences he’d come to prefer animals to people.

The morose thinking had him in a nasty mood again by the time they reached the hospital.

The paramedic got him settled in a wheelchair and turned him over to the emergency room staff. Based on his condition and the site doc’s assessment, he was fast-tracked.

Since the medical staff had cut off what had been left of his jeans, a nurse was kind enough to give him a pair of scrubs. Lavender might not have been his color of choice, but it was better than parading around in his underwear.

When they were done with him, he gingerly pulled on the scrubs. Loose though they were, he still winced when the light cotton brushed across his bandaged right thigh. He toyed with the crutches before leaving the treatment room. On his way out the front door he halted, remembering he didn’t have his truck. It was still at the scene of the earthquake.

He mumbled an expletive and hobbled back to the information counter. The young blonde gave him a big smile as he approached. He didn’t have the time or the inclination for her flirting. He asked her, in a less than pleasant manner, to call him a cab. Her smile faded and, perhaps not surprisingly, she seemed to get some satisfaction out of telling him that because of the earthquake, it might take up to forty minutes for the taxi to arrive. With a brittle smirk, she suggested he have a seat in the waiting area, and pointed to a grouping of uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs. He was about to move away when he pivoted back.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?” the receptionist asked without enthusiasm.

“A little girl was brought here from the earthquake site. Shortly before I was.”

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“Her name’s Kayla.” He lapsed into cop mode. “She’s approximately three feet five inches, near-black hair, dark brown eyes. Probably four or five years old.”

The woman had turned to her computer but looked at him expectantly. “May I have her last name?”

“Oh.” He searched his memory. He hadn’t asked, but thought back to when he was waiting in the triage area. “Ah... Rodrigues? No, that was the nurse. Hernandez? Yes, it’s Hernandez.”

“Are you family?”

“No.”

“Then I’m sorry, but—”

“I’m a cop,” he interrupted. “I brought her out of the building that collapsed on her.” His explanation seemed to mollify the woman. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Let me check...yes, she’s here. She’s been admitted...oh...”

“Is there a problem?”

“I was just checking family...” She looked up at Cal with a woeful expression.

“Are you saying they haven’t located any?”

The woman nodded.

“Can you tell me which room she’s in?” He gave her a brief smile. “It seems I have some time on my hands.”

Her smile wavered. “Pediatric ward. Room 4-235. The elevators are down the hall and to your left.”

As Cal shuffled in the direction the blonde had indicated, he felt discomfort in his chest and, with every step, a sharp pain in his shoulder.

He realized he must have sustained injuries beyond the obvious. Soft-tissue damage to his shoulder, probably when he’d hit the parapet wall on the rooftop, and maybe a cracked rib or two. Not much could be done about either, he mused as he adjusted his crutch to ease the pain.

He took the elevator to the fourth floor and found room 235. It contained four beds; three were occupied. The one closest to the door had a curtain drawn around it and Cal heard the murmur of voices. A girl, with her head, face and left arm bandaged, lay in the bed adjacent to it, her eyes closed. A man and woman clustered in chairs close to the bed, the woman holding the child’s hand. The man looked up at Cal, his face ravaged and grief-stricken, before turning to his daughter again.

On the farthest bed, next to the window, was Kayla. She had tubes and monitors attached to her. Other than that, she looked healthy and uninjured. Someone must have brushed the dust out of her hair, which was spread out, glistening, across her pillow. She wore a pink hospital gown with a teddy-bear print. Her head was turned away from him, toward the window. He could see her small chest rise rhythmically with her breathing.